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THE BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION 

OF THE WORKS OF 

|ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

ESSAYS OF TRAVEL AND 
IN THE ART OF WRITING 



THE BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION 
OF STEVENSON'S WORKS 



NOVELS AND ROMANCES 

TREASURE ISLAND 

PRINCE OTTO 

KIDNAPPED 

THE BLACK ARROW 

THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE 

THE WRONG BOX 

THE WRECKER 

DAVID BALFOUR 

THE EBB-TIDE 

WEIR OF HERMISTON 

ST. IVES 

SHORTER STORIES 

NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS 

THE DYNAMITER 

THE MERRY MEN, containing DR. 

JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 
ISLAND NIGHTS' ENTERTAINMENTS 

ESSArS, TRAf^ELS, AND SKETCHES 
AN INLAND VOYAGE 
TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY 
VIRGINIBUS PUERISQ^UE 
FAMILIAR STUDIES 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT, fonra/nin^ 

THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 
MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS 
IN THE SOUTH SEAS 
ACROSS THE PLAINS 
ESSAYS OF TRAVEL AND IN THE 
ART OF WRITING 

POEMS 
COMPLETE POEMS 



Twenty-five volumes. Sold singly or in sets 
Per vol.. Cloth, $1.00; Lim/> Leather, $I.3S "'*■ 

Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 



BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION 



ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 

AND IN 

FHE ART OF WRITING 



»l 



BY 

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1905 



ytJRARY of ■'sosiKrafjssS: 
r«o Sopies rstwawyj 

OCT. a? »yu5 

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OOPY 8. 

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Capyrighl, igo; 
Bv Charles Scribner's Sons 



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THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. 



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- PUBLISHERS? NOTE 

It has been thought best to include in the Biographical 
Edition of the works of Robert Louis Stevenson various 
literary papers and essays of travel which are not to be found 
in the regular trade edition of this writer's works. Of the 
essays, those on literary topics supply a full exposition of the 
author's philosophy of the art of writing; while the travel 
papers will be found to throw many illuminating and freshly 
suggestive lights not only upon the scenes described, but as 
well upon the richly imaginative mind of Stevenson himself. 
The bibliographical data in the list of contents explain the 
circumstances under which each of the essays was published. 



CONTENTS 

ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 

Page 

I. Edinburgh : Picturesque Notes .... 3 

(First published in The Portfolio, June-December, 1878.) 

II. Cockermouth and Keswick 84 

(First published in the Edinburgh Edition of Stevenson's 
Worlcs, December, 1896.) 

III. Roads 98 

(First published in The Portfolio, November, 1873.) 

IV. On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places io8 

(First published in The Portfolio, November, 1874.) 

V. An Autumn Effect 120 

(First pubUshed in The Portfolio, April-May, 1875.) 

VI. A Winter's Walk in Carrick and Gallo- 
way 148 

(First published in the Summer Number, 1896, of The Illus-' 
t rated Lotidon News.) 

VII. Forest Notes 162 

(First published in Tfte Cornhill IMagazine , May, 1876.) 

VIII. A Mountain Town in France 196 

(A Fragment, 1879; originally intended to serve as the open- 
ing chapter of " Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes.") 

IX. Random Memories: "Rosa Quo Locorum" 211 

(Drafted in 1893 or 1894 towards a new series of Essays for 
Scribner''s Magazine ; first pubUshed in the Edinburgh 
Edition of Stevenson's Works, December, 1896.) 

X. The Ideal House 222 

(First published from the note-book of the author in the Edin- 
burgh Edition of Stevenson's Works, June, 1898.) 



viii CONTENTS 

Page 
XI. Health and Mountains 230 

(First published in the Pall Mall Gazette, February 17, 1881,) 

XII. Davos in Winter 236 

(First pubHshed in the Pall Mall Gazette, February 21, 1881.) 

XIII. Alpine Diversions 241 

(First published in the Pall Mall Gazette, February 26, 1881.) 

XIV. The Stimulation of the Alps 246 

(First pubUshed in the Pall Mall Gazette, March 5, 1881.) 

ESSAYS IN THE ART OF WRITING 

I. On some Technical Elements of Style in 

Literature 253 

(First pubUshed in The Contemporary Review, April, 1885.) 

II. A Note on Realism 278 

(First published in The Magazine of Art, 1883.) 

III. The Morality of the Profession of Let- 

ters 287 

(First published in The Fortnightly Review, April, 1881.) 

IV. The Day after To-morrow 302 

(First published in The Cofite^nporary Reviejv, April, 1887.) 

V. Books which have influenced me . . . 317 

(First published in The British Weekly, May 13, 1887.) 

VI. The Genesis of "The Master of Ballan- 

trae" 327 

(Drafted in 1893 or 1894 towards a new series of Essays for 
Scribner''s Magazine ; first published in the Edinburgh 
Edition of Stevenson's Works, December, 1896.) 



ESSAYS OF TRAVEL 



EDINBURGH : PICTURESQUE 
NOTES 

I 

INTRODUCTORY 

THE ancient and famous metropolis of the 
North sits overlooking a windy estuary 
from the slope and summit of three 
hills. No situation could be more commanding for 
the head city of a kingdom ; none better chosen 
for noble prospects. From her tall precipice and 
terraced gardens she looks far and wide on the 
sea and broad champaigns. To the east you may 
catch at sunset the spark of the May lighthouse, 
where the Firth expands into the German Ocean; 
and away to the west, over all the carse of Stir- 
ling, you can see the first snows upon Ben Ledi. 

But Edinburgh pays cruelly for her high seat in 
one of the vilest climates under heaven. She is 
liable to be beaten upon by all the winds that blow, 
to be drenched with rain, to be buried in cold sea- 
fogs out of the east, and powdered with the snow 
as it comes flying southward from the Highland 
hills. The weather is raw and boisterous in winter. 



4 EDINBURGH 

shifty and iingenial in summer, and a downright 
meteorological purgatory in the spring. The deli- 
cate die early, and I, as a survivor, among bleak 
winds and plumping rain, have been sometimes 
tempted to envy them their fate. For all who love 
shelter and the blessings of the sun, who hate dark 
weather and perpetual tilting against squalls, there 
could scarcely be found a more unhomely and 
harassing place of residence. Many such aspire 
angrily after that Somewhere-else of the imagina- 
tion, where all troubles are supposed to end. They 
lean over the great bridge which joins the New 
Town with the Old — that windiest spot, or high 
altar, in this northern temple of the winds — and 
watch the trains smoking out from under them 
and vanishing into the tunnel on a voyage to 
brighter skies. Happy the passengers who shake 
off the dust of Edinburgh, and have heard for the 
last time the cry of the east wind among her 
chimney-tops ! And yet the place establishes an 
interest in people's hearts ; go where they ' will, 
they find no city of the same distinction ; go where 
they will, they take a pride in their old home. 

Venice, it has been said, differs from all other 
cities in the sentiment which she inspires. The 
rest may have admirers ; she only, a famous fair 
one, counts lovers in her train. And indeed, even 
by her kindest friends, Edinburgh is not consid- 
ered in a similar sense. These like her for many 
reasons, not any one of which is satisfactory in 
itself. They like her whimsically, if you will, and 
somewhat as a virtuoso dotes upon his cabinet. 



EDINBURGH 5 

Her attraction is romantic in the narrowest mean- 
ing of the term. Beautiful as she is, she is not 
so much beautiful as interesting. She is pre- 
eminently Gothic, and all 'die more so since she 
has set herself off with some Greek airs, and 
erected classic temples on her crags. In a word, 
and above all, she is a curiosity. The Palace of 
Holyrood has been left aside in the growth of 
Edinburgh ; and stands grey and silent in a work- 
man's quarter and among breweries and gas works. 
It is a house of many memories. Great people of 
yore, kings and queens, buffoons and grave am- 
bassadors, played their stately farce for centuries 
in Holyrood. Wars have been plotted, dancing 
has lasted deep into the night, murder has been 
done in its chambers. There Prince Charlie held 
his phantom levees, and in a very gallant manner 
represented a fallen dynasty for some hours. Now, 
all these things of clay are mingled with the dust, 
the king's crown itself is shown for sixpence to 
the vulgar ; but the stone palace has outlived these 
changes. For fifty weeks together, it is no more 
than a show for tourists and a museum of old 
furniture ; but on the fifty-first, behold the palace 
re-awakened and mimicking its past. The Lord 
Commissioner, a kind of stage sovereign, sits 
among stage courtiers ; a coach and six and clat- 
tering escort come and go before the gate; at 
night, the windows are lighted up, and its near 
neighbours, the workmen, may dance in their own 
houses to the palace music. And in this the palace 
is typical. There is a spark among the embers; 



6 EDINBURGH 

from time to time the old volcano smokes. Edin- 
burgh has but partly abdicated, and still wears, 
in parody, her metropolitan trappings. Half a 
capital and half a country town, the whole city 
leads a double existence ; it has long trances of 
the one and flashes of the other; like the king 
of the Black Isles, it is half alive and half a 
monumental marble. There are armed men and 
cannon in the citadel overhead ; you may see the 
troops marshalled on the high parade; and at 
night after the early winter evenfall, and in the 
morning before the laggard winter dawn, the 
wind carries abroad over Edinburg'h the sound 
of drums and bugles. Grave judges sit bewigged 
in what was once the scene of imperial delibera- 
tions. Close by in the High Street perhaps the 
trumpets may sound about the stroke of noon ; 
and you see a troop of citizens in tawdry mas- 
querade; tabard above, heather-mixture trouser 
below, and the men themselves trudging in the mud 
among unsympathetic bystanders. The grooms of 
a well-appointed circus tread the streets with a 
better presence. And yet these are the Heralds 
and Pursuivants of Scotland, who are about to 
proclaim a new law of the United Kingdom be- 
fore twoscore boys, and thieves, and hackney- 
coachmen. Meanwhile every hour the bell of the 
University rings out over the hum of the streets, 
and every hour a double tide of students, coming 
and going, fills the deep archways. And lastly, 
one night in the springtime — or say one morn- 
ing rather, at the peep of day — late folk may 



EDINBURGH 7 

hear the voices of many men singing a psahn in 
unison from a church on one side of the old High 
Street ; and a httle after, or perhaps a httle be- 
fore, the sound of many men singing a psalm in 
unison from another church on the opposite side 
of the way. There will be something in the words 
about the dew of Hermon, and how goodly it is. 
to see brethren dwelling together in unity. And 
the late folk will tell themselves that all this sing- 
ing denotes the conclusion of two yearly ecclesi- 
astical parliaments — the parliaments of Churches 
which are brothers in many admirable virtues, but 
not specially like brothers in this particular of a 
tolerant and peaceful life. 

Again, meditative people will find a charm in 
a certain consonancy between the aspect of the 
city and its odd and stirring history. Few places, 
if any, offer a more barbaric display of contrasts 
to the eye. In the very midst stands one of the 
most satisfactory crags in nature — a Bass Rock 
upon dry land, rooted in a garden, shaken by 
passing trains, carrying a crown of battlements 
and turrets, and describing its warlike shadow 
over the liveliest and brightest thoroughfare of 
the New Town. From their smoky beehives, ten 
stories high, the unwashed look down upon the 
open squares and gardens of the wealthy; and 
gay people sunning themselves along Princes 
Street, with its mile of commercial palaces all 
beflagged upon some great occasion, see, across 
a gardened valley set with statues, where the 
washings of the old town flutter in the breeze at 



8 EDINBURGH 

its high windows. And then, upon all sides, what 
a clashing of architecture ! In this one valley, 
where the life of the town goes most busily for- 
ward, there may be seen, shown one above and 
behind another by the accidents of the ground, 
buildings in almost every style upon the globe. 
Egyptian and Greek temples, Venetian palaces and 
Gothic spires, are huddled one over another in a 
most admired disorder; while, above all, the brute 
mass of the Castle and the summit of Arthur's 
Seat look down upon these imitations with a be- 
coming dignity, as the works of Nature may look 
down upon the monuments of Art. But Nature 
is a more indiscriminate patroness than we im- 
agine, and in no way frightened of a strong 
effect. The birds roost as willingly among the 
Corinthian capitals as in the crannies of the crag; 
the same atmosphere and daylight clothe the eter- 
nal rock and yesterday's imitation portico; and 
as the soft northern sunshine throws out every- 
thing into a glorified distinctness — or easterly 
mists, coming up with the blue evening, fuse all 
these incongruous features into one, and the lamps 
begin to glitter along the street, and faint lights 
to burn in the high windows across the valley — 
the feeling grows upon you that this also is a 
piece of nature in the most intimate sense; that 
this profusion of eccentricities, this dream in ma- 
sonry and living rock, is not a drop-scene in a 
theatre, but a city in the world of every-day 
reality, connected by railway and telegraph-wire 
with all the capitals of Europe, and inhabited by 



EDINBURGH 9 

citizens of the familiar type, who keep ledgers, 
and attend church, and have sold their immortal 
portion to a daily paper. By all the canons of 
romance, the place demands to be half deserted 
and leaning towards decay ; birds we might admit 
in profusion, the play of the sun and winds, and 
a few gipsies encamped in the chief thoroughfare; 
but these citizens, with their cabs and tramways, 
their trains and posters, are altogether out of key. 
Chartered tourists, they make free with historic 
localities, and rear their young among the most 
picturescjue sites with a grand human indifference. 
To see them thronging by, in their neat clothes 
and conscious moral rectitude, and with a little 
air of possession that verges on the absurd, is not 
the least striking feature of the place.^ 

And the story of the town is as eccentric as its 
appearance. For centuries it was a capital thatched 
with heather, and more than once, in the evil days 

1 These sentences have, I hear, given offence in my native town, 
and a proportionable pleasure to our rivals of Glasgow. I confess 
the news caused me both pain and merriment. May I remark, as 
a balm for wounded fellow-townsmen, that there is nothing deadly 
in my accusations ? Small blame to them if they keep ledgers : 't is 
an excellent business habit. Churchgoing is not, that ever I heard, 
a subject of reproach; decency of linen is a mark of prosperous 
affairs, and conscious moral rectitude one of the tokens of good 
living. It is not their fault if the city calls for something more 
specious by way of inhabitants. A man in a frock-coat looks out 
of place upon an Alp or Pyramid, although he has the virtues of 
a Peabody and the talents of a Bentham. And let them console 
themselves — they do as well as anybody else; the population of 
(let us say) Chicago would cut quite as rueful a figure on the same 
romantic stage. To the Glasgow people I would say only one word, 
but that is of gold : I have not yet written a book about Glasgozu. 



lo EDINBURGH 

of English invasion, it has gone up in flame to 
heaven, a beacon to ships at sea. It was the 
jousting-ground of jealous nobles, not only on 
Greenside or by the King's Stables, where set 
tournaments were fought to the sound of trum- 
pets and under the authority of the royal pres- 
ence, but in every alley where there was room to 
cross swords, and in the main street, where popu- 
lar tumult under the Blue Blanket alternated with 
the brawls of outlandish clansmen and retainers. 
Down in the palace John Knox reproved his queen 
in the accents of modern democracy. In the town, 
in one of those little shops plastered like so many 
swallows' nests among the buttresses of the old 
Cathedral, that familiar autocrat, James VI., would 
gladly share a bottle of wine with George Heriot 
the goldsmith. Up on the Pentland Hills, that so 
quietly look down on the Castle with the city 
lying in waves around it, those mad and dismal 
fanatics, the Sweet Singers, haggard from long 
exposure on the moors, sat day and night with 
" tearful psalms " to see Edinburgh consumed with 
fire from heaven, like another Sodom or Gomor- 
rah. There, in the Grass-market, stiff-necked, cove- 
nanting heroes offered up the often unnecessary, 
but not less honourable, sacrifice of their lives, and 
bade eloquent farewell to sun, moon, and stars, and 
earthly friendships, or died silent to the 'roll of 
drums. Down by yon outlet rode Grahame of 
Claverhouse and his thirty dragoons, with the town 
beating to arms behind their horses' tails — a sorry 
handful thus riding for their lives, but with a man 



EDINBURGH ii 

at the head who was to return in a different temper, 
make a dash that staggered Scotland to the heart, 
and die happily in the thick of fight. There Aiken- 
head was hanged for a piece of boyish incredulity ; 
there, a few years afterwards, David Hume ruined 
Philosophy and Faith, an undisturbed and well- 
reputed citizen ; and thither, in yet a few years 
more. Burns came from the plough-tail, as to an 
academy of gilt unbelief and artificial letters. 
There, when the great exodus was made across 
the valley, and the new town began to spread 
abroad its draughty parallelograms and rear its 
long frontage on the opposing hill, there was such 
a flitting, such a change of domicile and dweller, 
as was never excelled in the history of cities : the 
cobbler succeeded the earl ; the beggar ensconced 
himself by the judge's chimney; what had been 
a palace was used as a pauper refuge ; and great 
mansions were so parcelled out among the least 
and low^est in society, that the hearthstone of the 
old proprietor was thought large enough to be 
partitioned off into a bedroom by the new. 

II 

OLD TOWN — THE LANDS 

The Old Town, it is pretended, is the chief char- 
acteristic, and, from a picturesque point of view% 
the liver-wing of Edinburgh. It is one of the 
most common, forms of depreciation to throw cold 
water on the whole by adroit over-commendation 



12 EDINBURGH 

of a part, since everything worth judging, whether 
it be a man, a work of art, or only a fine city, 
must be judged upon its merits as a whole. The 
Old Town depends for much of its effect on the 
new quarters that lie around it, on the sufficiency 
of its situation, and on the hills that back it up. 
If you were to set it somewhere else by itself, it 
would look remarkably like Stirling in a bolder 
and loftier edition. The point is to see this em- 
bellished Stirling planted in the midst of a large, 
active, and fantastic modern city; for there the 
two react in a picturesque sense, and the one is 
the making of the other. 

The Old Town occupies a sloping ridge or tail 
of diluvial matter, protected, in some subsidence 
of the waters, by the Castle cliffs which fortify it 
to the west. On the one side of it and the other 
the new towns of the south and of the north oc- 
cupy their lower, broader, and more gentle hill- 
tops. Thus, the quarter of the Castle overtops the 
whole city and keeps an open view to sea and 
land. It dominates for miles on every side ; and 
people on the decks of ships, or ploughing in quiet 
country places over in Fife, can see the banner on 
the Castle battlements, and the smoke of the Old 
Town blowing abroad over the subjacent country. 
A city that is set upon a hill. It was, I suppose, 
from this distant aspect that she got her nickname 
of Aiild Reekie. Perhaps it was given her by 
people who had never crossed her doors : day after 
day, from their various rustic Pisgahs, they had 
seen the pile of building on the hilltop, and the 



EDINBURGH 13 

long plume of smoke over the plain ; so it ap- 
peared to them ; so it had appeared to their fathers 
tilling the same field ; and as that was all they 
knew of the place, it could be 'all expressed in 
these two words. 

Indeed, even on a nearer view, the Old Town is 
properly smoked ; and though it is well washed 
with rain all the year round, it has a grim and 
sooty aspect among its younger suburbs. It grew, 
under the law that regulates the growth of walled 
cities in precarious situations, not in extent, but 
in height and density. Public buildings were 
forced, wherever there was room for them, into 
the midst of thoroughfares ; thoroughfares were 
diminished into lanes ; houses sprang up storey 
after storey, neighbour mounting upon neighbour's 
shoulder, as in some Black Hole of Calcutta, until 
the population slept fourteen or fifteen deep in a 
vertical direction. The tallest of these lands, as 
they are locally termed, have long since been burnt 
out ; but to this day it is not uncommon to see 
eight or ten windows at a flight ; and the clif¥ 
of building which hangs imminent over Waverley 
Bridge would still put many natural precipices to 
shame. The cellars are already high above the 
gazer's head, planted on the steep hillside; as for 
the garret, all the furniture may be in the pawn- 
shop, but it commands a famous prospect to the 
Highland hills. The poor man may roost up 
there in the centre of Edinburgh, and yet have 
a peep of the green country from his window ; 
he shall see the quarters of the well-to-do fathoms 



14 EDINBURGH 

underneath, with their broad squares and gar- 
dens; he shall have nothing overhead but a few 
spires, the stone top-gallants of the city; and per- 
haps the wind may reach him with a rustic pure- 
ness, and bring a smack of the sea, or of flowering 
lilacs in the spring. 

It is almost the correct literary sentiment to 
deplore the revolutionary improvements of Mr. 
Chambers and his following. It is easy to be a 
conservator of the discomforts of others ; indeed, 
it is only our good qualities we find it irksome to 
conserve. Assuredly, in driving streets through 
the black labyrinth, a few curious old corners have 
been swept away, and some associations turned out 
of house and home. But what slices of sunlight, 
what breaths of clean air, have been let in ! And 
what a picturesque world remains untouched ! You 
go under dark arches, and down dark stairs and 
alleys. The way is so narrow that you can lay 
a hand on either wall ; so steep that, in greasy 
winter weather, the pavement is almost as treacher- 
ous as ice. Washing dangles above washing from 
the windows ; the houses bulge outwards upon 
flimsy brackets ; you see a bit of sculpture in a 
dark corner; at the top of all, a gable and a few 
crowsteps are printed on the sky. Here, you come 
into a court where the children are at play and 
the grown people sit upon their doorsteps, and 
perhaps a church spire shows itself above the 
roofs. Here, in the narrowest of the entry, you 
find a great old mansion still erect, with some 
insignia of its former state — some scutcheon, 



EDINBURGH 15 

some holy or courageous motto, on the Hntel. The 
local antiquary points out where famous and well- 
born people had their lodging ; and as you look 
up, out pops the head of a slatternly woman from 
the countess's window. The Bedouins camp within 
Pharaoh's palace walls, and the old war-ship is 
given o\'er to the rats. We are already a far way 
from the days when powdered heads w^ere plenti- 
ful in these alleys, with jolly, port-wine faces 
underneath. Even in the chief thoroughfares Irish 
washings flutter at the windows, and the pave- 
ments are encumbered with loiterers. 

These loiterers are a true character of the scene. 
Some shrewd Scotch workmen may have paused 
on their way to a job, debating Church affairs and 
politics with their tools upon their arm. But the 
most part are of a different order — skulking jail- 
birds ; unkempt, barefoot children ; big-mouthed, 
robust women, in a sort of uniform of striped 
flannel petticoat and short tartan shawl : among 
these, a few supervising constables and a dismal 
sprinkling of mutineers and broken men from 
higher ranks in society, with some mark of better 
days upon them, like a brand. In a place no larger 
than Edinburgh, and where the traffic is mostly 
centred in five or six chief streets, the same face 
comes often under the notice of an idle stroller. 
In fact, from this point of view, Edinburgh is not 
so much a small city as the largest of small towns. 
It is scarce possible to avoid observing your neigh- 
bours ; and I never yet heard of any one who tried. 
It has been my fortune, in this anonymous acci- 



i6 EDINBURGH 

dental way, to watch more than one of these 
downward travellers for some stages on the road 
to ruin. One man must have been upwards of 
sixty before I first observed him, and he made 
then a decent, personable figure in l^roadcloth of 
the best. For three years he kept falling — grease 
coming and buttons going from the square-skirted 
coat, the face pufting and pimpling, the shoulders 
growing bowed, the hair falling scant and grey 
upon his head; and the last that ever I saw of 
him, he was standing at the mouth of an entry 
with several men in moleskin, three parts drunk, 
and his old black raiment daubed with mud. I 
fancy that I still can hear him laugh. There was 
something heartbreaking in this gradual declension 
at so advanced an age ; you would have thought a 
man of sixty out of the reach of these calamities ; 
you would have thought that he was niched by 
that time into a safe place in life, whence he could 
pass quietly and honourably into the grave. 

One of the earliest marks of these degringolades 
is, that the victim begins to disappear from the 
New Town thoroughfares, and takes to the High 
Street, like a wounded animal to the woods. And 
such an one is the type of the quarter. It also 
has fallen socially. A scutcheon over the door 
somewhat jars in sentiment where there is a wash- 
ing at every window. The old man, when I saw 
him last, wore the coat in which he had played 
the gentleman three years before ; and that was 
just what gave him so pre-eminent an air of 
wretchedness. 



EDINBURGH 17 

It is true that the over-population was at least 
as dense in the epoch of lords and ladies, and 
that nowadays some customs which made Edin- 
burgh notorious of yore have been fortunately 
pretermitted. But an aggregation of comfort is 
not distasteful like an aggregation of the reverse. 
Nobody cares how many lords and ladies, and 
divines and lawyers, may have been crowded into 
these houses in the past — perhaps the more the 
merrier. The glasses clink around the china punch- 
bowl, some one touches the virginals, there are 
peacocks' feathers on the chimney, and the tapers 
burn clear and pale in the red firelight. That 
is not an ugly picture in itself, nor will it become 
ugly upon repetition. All the better if the like 
were going on in every second room; the land 
would only look the more inviting. Times are 
changed. In one house, perhaps, twoscore fam- 
ilies herd together ; and, perhaps, not one of them 
is wholly out of the reach of want. The great 
hotel is given over to discomfort from the founda- 
tion to the chimney-tops; everywhere a pinching, 
narrow habit, scanty meals, and an air of sluttish- 
ness and dirt. In the first room there is a birth, 
in another a death, in a third a sordid drinking- 
bout, and the detective and the Bible-reader cross 
upon the stairs. High words are audible from 
dwelling to dwelling, and children have a strange 
experience from the first; only a robust soul, you 
would think, could grow up in such conditions 
without hurt. And even if God tempers his dis- 
pensations to the young, and all the ill does not 



i8 EDINBU RGH 

arise that our apprehensions may forecast, the 
sight of such a way of living is disquieting to 
people who are more happily circumstanced. Social 
inequality is nowhere more ostentatious than at 
Edinburgh. I have mentioned already how, to the 
stroller along Princes Street, the High Street cal- 
lously exhibits its back garrets. It is true there 
is a garden between. And although nothing could 
be more glaring by way of contrast, sometimes 
the opposition is more immediate ; sometimes the 
thing lies in a nutshell, and there is not so much 
as a blade of grass between the rich and poor. 
To look over the South Bridge and see the Cow- 
gate below full of crying hawkers, is to view one 
rank of society from another in the twinkling of 
an eye. 

One night I went along the Cowgate after every 
one was abed but the policeman, and stopped by 
hazard before a tall land. The moon touched 
upon its chimneys, and shone blankly on the upper 
windows; there was no light anywhere in the 
great bulk of building; but as I stood there it 
seemed to me that I could hear quite a body of 
quiet sounds from the interior; doubtless there 
were many clocks ticking, and people snoring on 
their backs. And thus, as I fancied, the dense 
life within made itself faintly audible in my ears, 
family after family contributing its quota to the 
general hum, and the whole pile beating in tune 
to its timepieces, like a great disordered heart. 
Perhaps it was little more than a fancy altogether, 
but it was strangely impressive at the time, and 



EDINBURGH 19 

gave me an imaginative measure of the dispro- 
portion between the quantity of living flesh and 
the trifling wafls that separated and contained it. 

There was nothing fanciful, at least, but every 
circumstance of terror and reality, in the fall of 
the land in the High Street. The building had 
grown rotten to the core ; the entry underneath 
had suddenly closed up so that the scavenger's 
barrow^ could not pass ; cracks and reverberations 
sounded through the house at night ; the inhab- 
itants of the huge old human bee-hive discussed 
their peril when they encountered on the stair; 
some had even left their dwellings in a panic of 
fear, and returned to them again in a fit of econ- 
omy or self-respect; when, in the black hours of 
a Sunday morning, the whole structure ran to- 
gether with a hideous uproar and tumbled storey 
upon storey to the ground. The physical shock 
w-as felt far and near ; and the moral shock trav- 
elled with the morning milkmaid into all the 
suburbs. The church-bells never sounded more 
dismally over Edinburgh than that grey forenoon. 
Death had made a brave harvest ; and, like Sam- 
son, by pulling down one roof destroyed many a 
home. None who saw it can have forgotten tlie 
aspect of the gable: here it was plastered, there 
papered, according to the rooms ; here the kettle 
still stood on the hob, high overhead ; and there a 
cheap picture of the Queen was pasted over the 
chimney. So, by this disaster, you had a glimpse 
into the life of thirty families, all suddenly cut off 
from the revolving years. The land had fallen; 



20 EDINBURGH 

and with the land how much ! Far in the country, 
people saw a gap in the city ranks, and the sun 
looked through between the chimneys in an un- 
wonted place. And all over the world, in London, 
in Canada, in New Zealand, fancy what a multitude 
of people could exclaim with trutli : " The house 
that I was born in fell last nig^ht ! " 



III 

THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE 

Time has wrought its changes most notably 
around the precinct of St. Giles's Church. The 
church itself, if it were not for the spire, would be 
unrecognisable ; the Krauics are all gone, not a 
shop is left to shelter in its buttresses ; and zealous 
magistrates and a misguided architect have shorn 
the design of manhood, and left it poor, naked, and 
pitifully pretentious. As St. Giles's must have had 
in former days a rich and quaint appearance now 
forgotten, so the neighbourhood was bustling, sun- 
less, and romantic. It was here that the town was 
most overbuilt ; but the overbuilding has been all 
rooted out, and not only a free fairway left along 
the High Street with an open space on either side 
of the church, but a great porthole, knocked in the 
main line of the lands, gives an outlook to the 
north "and the New Town. 

There is a silly story of a subterranean passage 
between the Castle and Holyrood, and a bold High- 
land piper who volunteered to explore its windings. 



EDINBURGH 21 

He made his entrance by the upper end, playing a 
strathspey ; the curious footed it after him down 
the street, following his descent by the sound of the 
chanter from below ; until all of a sudden, about 
the level of St. Giles's, the music came abruptly 
to an end, and the people in the street stood at fault 
with hands uplifted. Whether he was choked with 
gases, or perished in a quag, or was removed bodily 
by the Evil One, remains a point of doubt ; but the 
piper has never ag"ain been seen or heard of from 
that day to this. Perhaps he wandered down into 
the land of Thomas the Rhymer, and some day, 
when it is least expected, may take a thought to 
revisit the sunlit upper world. That will be a 
strange moment for the cabmen on the stance be- 
sides St. Giles's, when they hear the drone of his 
pipes reascending from the bowels of the earth 
below their horses' feet. 

But it is not only pipers who have vanished, 
many a solid bulk of masonry has been likewise 
spirited into the air. Here, for example, is the 
shape of a heart let into the causeway. This was 
the site of the Tolbooth, the Heart of Midlothian, 
a place old in story and name-father to a noble 
book. The walls are now down in the dust ; there 
is no more squalor carccris for merry debtors, 
no more cage for the old acknowledged prison- 
breaker ; but the sun and the wind play freely over 
the foundations of the jail. Nor is this the only 
memorial that the pavement keeps of former days. 
The ancient burying-ground of Edinburgh lay be- 
hind St. Giles's Church, running down-hill to the 



22 EDINBURGH 

Cowgate and covering the site of the present Par- 
hament House. It has disappeared as utterly as 
the prison or the Luckenbooths ; and for those 
ignorant of its history, I know only one token that 
remains. In the Parliament Close, trodden daily 
underfoot by advocates, two letters and a date 
mark the resting-place of the man who made Scot- 
land over again in his own image, the indefatigable, 
undissuadable John Knox. He sleeps within call of 
the church that so often echoed to his preaching. 

Plard by the reformer, a bandy-legged and gar- 
landed Charles Second, made of lead, bestrides a 
tun-bellied charger. The King has his back turned, 
and, as you look, seems to be trotting clumsily 
away from such a dangerous neighbour. Often, 
for hours together, these two will be alone in the 
Close, for it lies out of the way of all but legal 
traffic. On one side the south wall of the church, 
on the other the arcades of the Parliament House, 
enclose this irregular bight of causeway and de- 
scribe their shadows on it in the sun. At either 
end, from round St. Giles's buttresses, you com- 
mand a look into the High Street with its motley 
passengers; but the stream goes by, east and west, 
and leaves the Parliament Close to Charles the 
Second and the birds. Once in a while, a patient 
crowd may be seen loitering there all day, some 
eating fruit, some reading a newspaper ; and to 
judge by their c|uiet demeanour, you would think 
they were waiting for a distribution of soup-tickets. 
The fact is far otherwise ; within in the Justiciary 
Court a man is upon trial for his life, and these 



EDINBURGH 23 

are some of the curious for whom the gallery was 
found too narrow. Towards afternoon, if the 
prisoner is unpopular, there will be a round of 
hisses when he is brought forth. Once in awhile, 
too, an advocate in wig and gown, hand upon 
mouth, full of pregnant nods, sweeps to and fro 
in the arcade listening to an agent ; and at certain 
regular hours a whole tide of lawyers hurries 
across the space. 

The Parliament Close has been the scene of 
marking incidents in Scottish history. Thus, when 
the Bishops were ejected from the Convention in 
1688, " all fourteen of them gathered together with 
pale faces and stood in a cloud in the Parliament 
Close " : poor episcopal personages who were done 
with fair weather for life! Some of the west- 
country Societarians standing by, who would have 
" rejoiced more than in great sums " to be at their 
hanging, hustled them so rudely that they knocked 
their heads together. It was not magnanimous 
behaviour to dethroned enemies ; but one, at least, 
of the Societarians had groaned in the boots, and 
they had all seen their dear friends upon the scaf- 
fold. Again, at the " woeful Union," it was here 
that people crowded to escort their favourite from 
the last of Scottish parliaments: people flushed 
with nationality, as Boswell would have said, ready 
for riotous acts, and fresh from throwing stones 
at the author of " Robinson Crusoe " as he looked 
out of window. 

One of the pious in the seventeenth century, 
going to pass his trials (examinations as we now 



24 EDINBURGH 

say) for the Scottish Bar, beheld the Parhament 
Close open and had a vision of the mouth of Hell. 
This, and small wonder, was the means of his 
conversion. Nor was the vision unsuitable to the 
locality; for after an hospital, what uglier piece is 
there in civilisation than a court of law? Hither 
come envy, malice, and all uncharitableness to 
wrestle it out in public tourney; crimes, broken 
fortunes, severed households, the knave and his 
victim, gravitate to this low building with the 
arcade. To how many has not St. Giles's bell 
told the first hour after ruin? I think I see them 
pause to count the strokes, and wander on again 
into the moving High Street, stunned and sick at 
heart. 

A pair of swing doors gives admittance to a 
hall with a carved roof, hung with legal portraits, 
adorned with legal statuary, lighted by windows 
of painted glass, and warmed by three vast fires. 
This is the Salle dcs pas pcrdus of the Scottish 
Bar, Here, by a ferocious custom, idle youths must 
promenade from ten till two. From end to end, 
singly or in pairs or trios, the gowns and wigs go 
back and forward. Through a hum of talk and 
footfalls, the piping tones of a Macer announce 
a fresh cause and call upon the names of those 
concerned. Intelligent men have been walking 
here daily for ten or twenty years without a rag 
of business or a shilling of reward. In process 
of time, they may perhaps be made the SherifT- 
Substitute and Fountain of Justice at Lerwick or 
Tobermory. There is nothing required, you would 



EDINBURGH 25 

say, but a little patience and a taste for exercise 
and bad air. To breathe dust and bombazine, to 
feed the mind on cackHng gossip, to hear three 
parts of a case and drink a glass of sherry, to 
long with indescribable longings for the hour when 
a man may slip out of his travesty and devote 
himself to golf for the rest of the afternoon, and 
to do this day by day and year after year, may 
seem so small a thing to the inexperienced! But 
those who have made the experiment are of a 
different way of thinking, and count it the most 
arduous form of idleness. 

More swing doors open into pigeon-holes where 
Judges of the First Appeal sit singly, and halls 
of audience where the supreme Lords sit by three 
or four. Here, you may see Scott's place within 
the bar, where he wrote many a page of Waverley 
novels to the drone of judicial proceeding. You 
will hear a good deal of shrewdness, and, as their 
Lordships do not altogether disdain pleasantry, a 
fair proportion of dry fun. The broadest of broad 
Scotch is now banished from the bench; but the 
courts still retain a certain national flavour. We 
have a solemn enjoyable way of lingering on a 
case. We treat law as a fine art, and relish and 
digest . a good distinction. There is no hurry : 
point after point must be rightly examined and 
reduced to principle ; judge after judge must utter 
forth his obiter dicta to delighted brethren. 

Besides the courts, there are installed under the 
same roof no less than three libraries: two of no 
mean order; confused and semi-subterranean, full 



26 EDINBURGH 

of stairs and galleries ; where yon may see the 
most studious-looking wigs fishing out novels by 
lanthorn light, in the very place where the old 
Privy Council tortured Covenanters. As the Par- 
liament House is built upon a slope, although it 
presents only one storey to the north, it measures 
half-a-dozen at least upon the south; and range 
after range of vaults extend below the libraries. 
Few places are more characteristic of this hilly 
capital. You descend one stone stair after another, 
and wander, by the flicker of a match, in a laby- 
rinth of stone cellars. Now, you pass below the 
Outer Hall and hear overhead, brisk but ghostly, 
the interminable pattering of legal feet. Now, you 
come upon a strong door with a wicket : on the 
other side are the cells of the police office and 
the trap-stair that gives admittance to the dock in 
the Justiciary Court. Many a foot that has gone 
up there lightly enough, has been dead-heavy in the 
descent. Many a man's life has been argued away 
from him during long hours in the court above. 
But just now that tragic stage is empty and silent 
like a church on a week-day, with the bench all 
sheeted up and nothing moving but the sunbeams 
on the wall. A little farther and you strike upon 
a room, not empty like the rest, but crowded with 
productions from by-gone criminal cases : a grim 
lumber: lethal weapons, poisoned organs in a jar, 
a door with a shot hole through the panel, behind 
which a man fell dead. I cannot fancy why they 
should preserve them, unless it were against the 
Judgment Day. At length, as you continue to 



EDINBURGH 27 

descend, you see a peep of yellow gaslight and 
hear a jostling, whispering noise ahead ; next 
moment you turn a corner, and there, in a white- 
washed passage, is a machinery belt industriously 
turning on its wheels. You would think the en- 
gine had grown there of its own accord, like a 
cellar fungus, and would soon spin itself out and 
fill the vaults from end to end with its mysterious 
labours. In truth, it is only some gear of the 
steam ventilator; and you will find the engineers 
at hand, and may step out of their door into the 
sunlight. For all this while, you have not been 
descending towards the earth's centre, but only 
to the bottom of the hill and the foundations of 
the Parliament House; low down, to be sure, but 
still under the open heaven and in a field of 
grass. The daylight shines garishly on the back 
windows of the Irish quarter ; on broken shutters, 
wry gables, old palsied houses on the brink of 
ruin, a crumbling human pig-sty fit for human 
pigs. There are few signs of life, besides a scanty 
washing or a face at a window : the dwellers are 
abroad, but they will return at night and stagger 
to their pallets. 

IV 

LEGENDS 

The character of a place is often most per- 
fectly expressed in its associations. An event 
strikes root and s^rows into a legend, when it has 



28 EDINBURGH 

happened amongst congenial surroundings. Ugly 
actions, above all in ugly places, have the true 
romantic quality, and become an undying property 
of their scene. To a man like Scott, the different 
appearances of nature seemed each to contain its 
own legend ready made, which it was his to call 
forth : in such or such a place, only such or such 
events ought with propriety to happen ; and in 
this spirit he made the Lady of the Lake for Ben 
Venue, the Heart of Midlothian for Edinburgh, 
and the Pirate, so indifferently written but so 
romantically conceived, for the desolate islands and 
roaring tideways of the North. The common run 
of mankind have, from generation to generation, 
an instinct almost as delicate as that of Scott; 
but where he created new things, they only for- 
get what is unsuitable among the old ; and by 
survival of the fittest, a body of tradition becomes 
a work of art. So, in the low dens and high- 
flying garrets of Edinburgh, people may go back 
upon dark passages in the town's adventures, and 
chill their marrow with winter's tales about the 
fire ; tales that are singularly apposite and char- 
acteristic, not only of the old life, but of the very 
constituticm of built nature in that part, and singu- 
larly well cjualified to add horror to horror, when 
the wind pipes around the tall lands, and hoots 
adown arched passages, and the far-spread wilder- 
ness of city lamps keeps cjuavering and flaring in 
the gusts. 

Here, it is the tale of Begbie the bank-porter, 
stricken to the heart at a blow and left in his 



EDINBURGH 29 

blood within a step or two of the crowded High 
Street. There, people hush their voices over Burke 
and Hare; over drugs and violated graves, and 
the resurrection-men smothering their victims with 
their knees. Here, again, the fame of Deacon 
Brodie is kept piously fresh. A great man in his 
day was the Deacon ; well seen in good society, 
crafty with his hands as a cabinet-maker, and one 
who could sing a song with taste. ]\Iany a citizen 
was proud to welcome the Deacon to supper, and 
dismissed him with regret at a timeous hour, who 
would have been vastly disconcerted had he known 
how soon, and in what guise, his visitor returned. 
Many stories are told of this redoubtable Edin- 
burgh burglar, but the one I have in my mind 
most vividly gives the key of all the rest. A 
friend of Brodie's, nested some way towards 
heaven in one of these great lands, had told him 
of a projected visit to the country, and after- 
wards detained by some afifairs, put it off and 
stayed the night in town. The good man had 
lain some time awake; it was far on in the small 
hours by the Tron bell ; when suddenly there 
came a creak, a jar, a faint light. Softly he 
clambered out of bed and up to a false window 
which looked upon another room, and there, by 
the glimmer of a thieves' lantern, was his good 
friend the Deacon in a mask. It is characteristic 
of the town and the town's manners that this 
little episode should have been quietly tided over, 
and quite a good time elapsed before a great 
robbery, an escape, a Bow Street runner, a cock- 



30 EDINBURGH 

fight, an apprehension in a cupboard in Amster- 
dam, and a last step into the air off his own 
greatly improved gallows drop, brought the career 
of Deacon William Brodie to an end. But still, 
by the mind's eye. he may be seen, a man harassed 
below a mountain of duplicity, slinking from a 
magistrate's supper-room to a thieves' ken, and 
pickeering among the closes by the flicker of a 
dark lamp. 

Or where the Deacon is out of favour, perhaps 
some memory lingers of the great plagues, and 
of fatal houses still unsafe to enter within the 
memory of man. For in time of pestilence the 
discipline had been sharp and sudden, and what 
we now call " stamping out contagion " was car- 
ried on with' deadly rigour. The officials, in their 
gowns of grey, with a white St. Andrew's cross 
'on back and breast, and a white cloth carried 
before them on a staff, perambulated the city, 
adding the terror of man's justice to the fear of 
God's visitation. The dead they buried on the 
Borough Muir ; the living who had concealed the 
sickness were drowned, if they were women, in 
the Quarry Holes, and if they were men, were 
hanged and gibbeted at their own doors ; and 
W'herever the evil had passed, furniture was de- 
stroyed and houses closed. And the most bogey- 
ish part of the story is about such houses. Two 
generations back they still stood dark and empty; 
people avoided them as they passed by; the bold- 
est school-boy only shouted through the keyhole 
and made off; for within, it was supposed, the 



EDINBURGH 31 

plague lay ambushed like a basilisk, ready to flow 
forth and spread blain and pustule through the 
city. What a terrible next-door neighbour for 
superstitious citizens! A rat scampering within 
would send a shudder through the stoutest heart. 
Here, if you like, was a sanitary parable, ad- 
dressed by our uncleanly forefathers to their own 
neglect. 

And then we have Major Weir; for although 
even his house is now demolished, old Edinburgh 
cannot clear herself of his unholy memory. He 
and his sister lived together in an odour of sour 
piety. She was a marvellous spinster; he had a 
rare gift of supplication, and was known among 
devout admirers by the name of Angelical Thomas. 
" He was a tall, black man, and ordinarily looked 
down to the ground ; a grim countenance, and a 
big nose. His garb was still a cloak, and some- 
what dark, and he never went without his staff.'' 
How it came about that Angelical Thomas was 
burned in company with his staff, and his sister 
in gentler manner hanged, and whether these two 
were simply religious maniacs of the more furious 
order, or had real as well as imaginary sins upon 
their old-world shoulders, are points happily be- 
yond the reach of our intention. At least, it is 
suitable enough that out of this superstitious city 
some such example should have been put forth : 
the outcome and fine flower of dark and vehement 
religion. And at least the facts struck the public 
fancy and brought forth a remarkable family of 
myths. It would appear that the Major's staff 



32 EDINBURGH 

went upon his errands, and even ran before him 
with a lantern on dark nights. Gigantic females, 
" stentoriously laughing and gaping with tehees 
of laughter " at unseasonable hours of night and 
morning, haunted the purlieus of his abode. His 
house fell under s^ich a load of infamy that no 
one dared to sleep in it, until municipal improve- 
ment levelled the structure with the ground. And 
my father has often been told in the nursery how 
the devil's coach, drawn by six coal-black horses 
with fiery eyes, would drive at night into the 
West Bow, and belated people might see the dead 
Major through the glasses. 

Another legend is that of the two maiden sis- 
ters. A legend I am afraid it may be, in the 
most discreditable meaning of the term ; or per- 
haps something worse — a mere yesterday's fic- 
tion. But it is a story of some vitality, and is 
worthy of a place in the Edinburgh calendar. This 
pair inhabited a single room ; from the facts, it 
must have been double-bedded ; and it may have 
been of some dimensions : but when all is said, 
it was a single room. Here our two spinsters fell 
out — on some point of controversial divinity be- 
like : but fell out so bitterly that there was never 
a word spoken between them, black or white, from 
that day forward. You would have thought they 
would separate : but no ; whether from lack of 
means, or the Scottish fear of scandal, they con- 
tinued to keep house together where they were. 
A chalk line drawn upon the floor separated their 
two domains; it bisected the doorway and the 



EDINBURGH 33 

fireplace, so that each could go out and in, and 
do her cooking, without violating the territory of 
the other. So, for years, they coexisted in a 
hateful silence; their meals, their ablutions, their 
friendly visitors, exposed to an unfriendly scru- 
tiny; and at night, in the dark watches, each 
could hear the breathing of her enemy. Never 
did four walls look down upon an uglier spectacle 
than these sisters rivalling in unsisterliness. Here 
is a canvas for Hawthorne to have turned into a 
cabinet picture — he had a Puritanic vein, which 
would have fitted him to treat this Puritanic horror ; 
he could have shown them to us in their sicknesses 
and at their hideous twin devotions, thumbing a 
pair of great Bibles, or praying aloud for each 
other's penitence with marrowy emphasis; now 
each, with kilted petticoat, at her own corner of 
the fire on some tempestuous evening ; now sitting 
each at her window, looking out upon the summer 
landscape sloping far below them towards the firth, 
and the field-paths where they had wandered hand 
in hand ; or, as age and infirmity grew upon them 
and prolonged their toilettes, and their hands began 
to tremble and their heads to nod involuntarily, 
growing only the more steeled in enmity with 
years; until one fine day, at a word, a look, a 
visit, or the approach of death, their hearts would 
melt and the chalk boundary be overstepped for 
ever. 

Alas ! to those who know the ecclesiastical his- 
tory of the race — the most perverse and melan- 
choly in man's annals — this will seem only a figure 



34 EDINBURGH 

of much that is typical of Scotland and her high- 
seated capital above the Forth — a figure so grimly 
realistic that it may pass with strangers for a cari- 
cature. We are wonderful patient haters for con- 
science' sake up here in the North. I spoke, in 
the first of these papers, of the Parliaments of the 
Established and Free Churches, and how they can 
hear each other singing psalms across the street. 
There is but a street between them in space, but 
a shadow between them in principle ; and yet there 
they sit, enchanted, and in damnatory accents pray 
for each other's growth in grace. It would be 
well if there were no more than two; but the sects 
in Scotland form a large family of sisters, and the 
chalk lines are thickly drawn, and run through the 
midst of many private homes. Edinburgh is a city 
of churches, as though it were a place of pilgrim- 
age. You will see four within a stone-cast at the 
head of the West Bow. Some are crowded to the 
doors; some are empty like monuments; and yet 
you will ever find new ones in the building. Hence 
that surprising clamour of church bells that sud- 
denly breaks out upon the Sabbath morning, from 
Trinity and the sea-skirts to Morningside on the 
borders of the hills. I have heard the chimes of 
Oxford playing their symphony in a golden au- 
tumn morning, and beautiful it was to hear. But 
in Edinburgh all manner of loud bells join, or 
rather disjoin, in one swelling, brutal babblement 
of noise. Now one overtakes another, and now 
lags behind it ; now five or six all strike on the 
pained tympanum at the same punctual instant of 



EDINBURGH 3s 

time, and make together a dismal chord of dis- 
cord; and now for a second all seem to have con- 
spired to hold their peace. Indeed, there are not 
many uproars in this world more dismal than that 
of the Sabbath bells in Edinburgh : a harsh eccle- 
siastical tocsin; the outcry of incongruous ortho- 
doxies, calling on every separate conventicler to 
put up a protest, each in his own synagogue, 
against " right-hand extremes and left-hand de- 
fections." And surely there are few worse ex- 
tremes than this extremity of zeal ; and few more 
deplorable defections than this disloyalty to Chris- 
tian love. Shakespeare wrote a comedy of " Much 
Ado about Nothing." The Scottish nation made 
a fantastic tragedy on the same subject. And it 
is for the success of this remarkable piece that 
these bells are sounded every Sabbath morning on 
the hills above the Forth. How many of them 
might rest silent in the steeple, how many of these 
ugly churches might be demolished and turned 
once more into useful building material, if people 
who think almost exactly the same thoughts about 
religion would condescend to worship God under 
the same roof! But there are the chalk lines. 
And which is to pocket pride, and speak the fore- 
most word? 



S6 EDINBURGH 



GREYFRIARS 

It was Queen Mary who threw open the gardens 
of the Grey Friars : a new and semi-rural ceme- 
tery in those days, although it has grown an 
antiquity in its turn and been superseded by half- 
a-dozen others. The Friars must have had a 
pleasant time on summer evenings ; for their gar- 
dens were situated to a wish, with the tall Castle 
and the tallest of the Castle crags in front. Even 
now, it is one of our famous Edinburgh points of 
view; and strangers are led thither to see, by yet 
another instance, how strangely the city lies upon 
her hills. The enclosure is of an irregular shape; 
the double church of Old and New Greyfriars 
stands on the level at the top; a few thorns are 
dotted here and there, and the ground falls by 
terrace and steep slope towards the north. The 
open shows many slabs and table tombstones; and 
all round the margin, the place is girt by an array 
of aristocratic mausoleums appallingly adorned. 

Setting aside the tombs of Roubilliac, which 
belong to the heroic order of graveyard art, we 
Scotch stand, to my fancy, highest among nations 
in the matter of grimly illustrating death. We 
seem to love for their own sake the emblems of 
time and the great change; and even around 
country churches you will find a wonderful ex- 
hibition of skulls, and crossbones, and noseless 



EDINBURGH 37 

angels, and trumpets pealing for the Judgment 
Day. Every mason was a pedestrian Holbein : 
he had a deep consciousness of death, and loved 
to put its terrors pithily before the churchyard 
loiterer ; he was brimful of rough hints upon mor- 
tality, and any dead farmer was seized upon to 
be a text. The classical examples of this art are 
in Greyfriars. In their time, these were doubtless 
costly monuments, and reckoned of a very elegant 
proportion by contemporaries ; and now, when the 
elegance is not so apparent, the significance re- 
mains. You may perhaps look with a smile on 
the profusion of Latin mottoes — some crawling 
endwise up the shaft of a pillar, some issuing on 
a scroll from angels' trumpets — on the emblem- 
atic horrors, the figures rising headless from the 
grave, and all the traditional ingenuities in which 
it pleased our fathers to set forth their sorrow 
for the dead and their sense of earthly mutability. 
But it is not a hearty sort of mirth. Each orna- 
ment may have been executed by the merriest 
apprentice, whistling as he plied the mallet; but 
the original meaning of each, and the combined 
effect of so many of them in this quiet enclosure, 
is serious to the point of melancholy. 

Round a great part of the circuit, houses of a 
low class present their backs to the churchyard. 
Only a few inches separate the living from the 
dead. Here, a window is partly blocked up by the 
pediment of a tomb ; there, where the street falls 
far below the level of the graves, a chimney has 
been trained up the back of a monument, and a 



38 EDINBURGH 

red pot looks vulgarly over from behind. A damp 
smell of the graveyard finds its way into houses 
where workmen sit at meat. Domestic life on a 
small scale goes forward visibly at the windows. 
The very solitude and stillness of the enclosure, 
which lies apart from the town's traffic, serves to 
accentuate the contrast. As you walk upon the 
graves, you see children scattering crumbs to feed 
the sparrows ; you hear people singing or washing 
dishes, or the sound of tears and castigation; the 
linen on a clothespole flaps against funereal sculp- 
ture; or perhaps the cat slips over the lintel and 
descends on a memorial urn. And as there is 
nothing else astir, these incongruous sights and 
noises take hold on the attention and exaggerate 
the sadness of the place. 

Greyfriars is continually overrun by cats. I 
have seen one afternoon as many as thirteen of 
them seated on the grass beside old Milne, the 
Master Builder, all sleek and fat, and complacently 
blinking, as if they had fed upon strange meats. 
Old Milne was chaunting with the saints, as we 
may hope, and cared little for the company about 
his grave; but I confess the spectacle had an ugly 
side for me; and I was glad to step forward and 
raise my eyes to where the Castle and the roofs 
of the Old Town, and the spire of the Assembly 
Hall, stood deployed against the sky with the 
colourless precision of engraving. An open out- 
look is to be desired from a churchyard, and a 
sight of the sky and some of the world's beauty 
relieves a mind from morbid thoughts. 



EDINBURGH 39 

I shall never forget one visit. It was a grey, 
dropping day ; the grass was strung with . rain- 
drops; and the people in the houses kept hanging 
out their shirts and petticoats and angrily taking 
them in again, as the weather turned from wet 
to fair and back again. A grave-digger, and a 
friend of his, a gardener from the country, ac- 
companied me into one after another of the cells 
and little courtyards in which it gratified the 
wealthy of old days to enclose their old bones 
from neighbourhood. In one, under a sort of 
shrine, we found a forlorn human effigy, very 
realistically executed down to the detail of his 
ribbed stockings, and holding in his hand a ticket 
with the date of his demise. He looked most 
pitiful arid ridiculous, shut up by himself in his 
aristocratic precinct, like a bad old boy or an in- 
ferior forgotten deity under a new dispensation; 
the burdocks grew familiarly about his feet, the 
rain dripped all round him; and the world main- 
tained the most entire indifference as to who he 
was or whither he had gone. In another, a vaulted 
tomb, handsome externally but horrible inside with 
damp and cobwebs, there were three mounds of 
black earth and an uncovered thigh bone. This 
was the place of interment, it appeared, of a family 
with whom the gardener had been long in service. 
He was among old acquaintances. " This '11 be 
Miss Marg'et's," said he, giving the bone a friendly 
kick. " The auld ! " I have always an un- 
comfortable feeling in a graveyard, at sight of 
so many tombs to perpetuate memories best for- 



40 EDINBURGH 

gotten ; but I never had the impression so strongly 
as that day. People had been at some expense in 
both these cases: to provoke a melancholy feeling 
of derision in the one, and an insulting epithet in 
the other. The proper inscription for the most 
part of mankind, I began to think, is the cynical 
jeer, eras tibi. That, if anything, will stop the 
mouth of a carper; since it both admits the worst 
and carries the war triumphantly into the enemy's 
camp. 

Greyfriars is a place of many associations. There 
was one window in a house at the lower end, now 
demolished, which was pointed out to me by the 
grave-digger as a spot of legendary interest. 
Burke, the resurrection man, infamous for so many 
murders at five shillings a head, used to sit thereat, 
with pipe and nightcap, to watch burials going 
forward on the green. In a tomb higher up, 
which must then have been but newly finished, 
John Knox, according to the same informant, had 
taken refuge in a turmoil of the Reformation. 
Behind the church is the haunted mausoleum of 
Sir George Mackenzie: Bloody Mackenzie, Lord 
Advocate in the Covenanting troubles and author 
of some pleasing sentiments on toleration. Here, 
in the last century, an old Heriot's Hospital boy 
once harboured from the pursuit of the police. 
The Hospital is next door to Greyfriars — a 
courtly building among lawns, where, on Founder's 
Day, you may see a multitude of children play- 
ing Kiss-in-the-Ring and Round the Mulberry- 
bush. Thus, when the fugitive had managed to 



EDINBURGH 41 

conceal himself in the tomb, his old schoolmates 
had a hundred opportunities to bring him food; 
and there he lay in safety till a ship was found 
to smuggle him abroad. But his must have been 
indeed a heart of brass, to lie all day and night 
alone with the dead persecutor; and other lads 
were far from emulating him in courage. When 
a man's soul is certainly in hell, his body will 
scarce lie quiet in a tomb however costly; some 
time or other the door must open, and the repro- 
bate come forth in the abhorred garments of the 
grave. It was thought a high piece of prowess to 
knock at the Lord Advocate's mausoleum and chal- 
lenge him to appear. " Bluidy Mackingie, come 
oot if ye dar' ! " sang the foolhardy urchins. But 
Sir George had other affairs on hand ; and the 
author of an essay on toleration continues to sleep 
peacefully among the many whom he so intoler- 
antly helped to slay. 

For this infclix campus, as it is dubbed in one 
of its own inscriptions — an inscription over which 
Dr. Johnson passed a critical eye — is in many 
ways sacred to the memory of the men whom 
Mackenzie persecuted. It was here, on the flat 
tombstones, that the Covenant was signed by an 
enthusiastic people. In the long arm of the 
churchyard that extends to Lauriston, the pris- 
oners from Bothwell Bridge — fed on bread and 
water and guarded, life for life, by vigilant marks- 
men — lay five months looking for the scaffold or 
the plantations. And while the good work was 
going forward in the Grassmarket, idlers in Grey- 



i 



42 EDINBURGH 

friars might have heard the throb of the mihtary 
drums that drowned the voices of the martyrs. 
Nor is this ah : for down in the corner farthest 
from Sir George, there stands a monument dedi- 
cated, in uncouth Covenanting verse, to all who 
lost their lives in that contention. There is no 
moorsman shot in a snow shower beside Irongray 
or Co'monell ; there is not one of the two hun- 
dred who were drowned off the Orkneys; nor so 
much as a poor, over-driven. Covenanting slave in 
the American plantations; but can lay claim to a 
share in that memorial and, if such things interest 
just men among the shades, can boast he has a 
monument on earth as well as Julius Caesar or 
the Pharaohs. Where they may all lie, I know 
not. Far-scattered bones, indeed! But if the 
reader cares to learn how some of them — or 
some part of some of them — found their way at 
length to such honourable sepulture, let him listen 
to the words of one who was their comrade in 
life and their apologist when they were dead. 
Some of the insane controversial matter I omit, 
as well as some digressions, but leave the rest in 
Patrick Walker's language and orthography : 

" The never to be forgotten Mr. James Renivick told me, 
that he was Witness to their Public Murder at the Gallowlce, 
between Leilh and Edinburgh, when he saw the Hangman 
hash and hagg off all their Five Heads, with Patrick Fore- 
mail's Right Hand: Their Bodies were all buried at the Gal- 
lows Foot; their Heads, with Patrick's Hand, were brought 
and put upon five Pikes on the Pleasaunce-Port. . . . Mr. 
Renwick told me also that it was the first public Action that 
his Hand was at, to conveen Friends, and lift their murthered 



EDINBURGH 43 

Bodies, and carried them to the West Churchyard of Edin- 
burgh,'' — not Greyfriars, this time, — " and buried them there. 
Then they came about the City . . . and took down these Five 
Heads and that Hand ; and Day being come, they went quickly 
up the Pleasaunce ; and when they came to Laurtsioun Yards, 
upon the South-side of the City, they durst not venture, being 
so light, to go and bury their Heads with their Bodies, which 
they designed ; it being present Death, if any of them had 
been found. Alexander Tweedie, a Friend, being with them, 
who at that Time was Gardner in these Yards, concluded to 
bury them in his Yard, being in a Box (wrapped in Linen), 
where they lay 45 Years except 3 Days, being executed upon 
the loth of October 1681, and found the 7th Day of October 
1726. That Piece of Ground lay for some Years unlaboured ; 
and trenching it, the Gardner found them, which affrighted 
him; the Box was consumed. Mr. Schaw, the Owner of these 
Yards, caused lift them, and lay them upon a Table in his 
Summer-house : Mr. Schawls mother was so kind, as to cut 
out a Linen-cloth, and cover them. They lay Twelve Days 
there, where all had Access to see them. Alexatider Tweedie, 
the foresaid Gardner, said, when dying, There was a Treasure 
hid in his Yard, but neither Gold nor Silver. Daniel Tweedte, 
his Son, came along with me to that Yard, and told me that his 
Father planted a white Rose-bush above them, and farther 
down the Yard a red Rose-bush, which were more fruitful than 
any other Bush in the Yard. . . . Many came" — to see the 
heads — "out of Curiosity; yet I rejoiced to see so many con- 
cerned grave Men and Women favouring the Dust of our 
Martyrs. There were Six of us concluded to bury them upon 
the Nineteenth Day of October 1726, and every One of us to 
acquaint Friends of the Day and Hour, being Wednesday, the 
Day of the Week on which most of them were executed, and 
at 4 of the Clock at Night, being the Hour that most of them 
went to their resting Graves. We caused make a compleat 
Coffin for them in Black, with four Yards of fine Linen, the 
way that our Martyrs Corps were managed. . . . Accordingly 
we kept the aforesaid Day and Hour, and doubled the Linen, 
and laid the Half of it below them, their nether Jaws being 
parted from their Heads; but being young Men, their Teeth 
remained. All were Witness to the Holes in each of their 



I 



44 EDINBURGH 

Heads, which the Hangman broke with his Hammer; and 
according to the Bigness of their Sculls, we laid the Jaws to 
them, and drew the other Half of the Linen above them, and 
stufft the Coffin with Shavings. Some prest hard to go thorow 
the chief Parts of the City as was done at the Revolution; 
but this we refused, considering that it looked airy and frothy, 
to make such Show of them, and inconsistent with the solid 
serious Observing of such an affecting, surprizing unheard-of 
Dispensation : But took the ordinary Way of other Burials 
from that Place, to wit, we went east the Back of the Wall, 
and in at Bristo-Port, and down the Way to the Head of the 
Cowgate^ and turned up to the Church-yard, where they were 
interred closs to the Martyrs Tomb, with the greatest Multi- 
tude of People Old and Young, Men and Women, Ministers 
and others, that ever I saw together." 

And so there they were at last, in " their resting 
graves." So long as men do their duty, even if it 
be greatly in a misapprehension, they will be lead- 
ing pattern lives ; and whether or not they come 
to lie beside a martyrs' monument, we may be 
sure they will find a safe haven somewhere in the 
providence of God. It is not well to think of 
death, unless we temper the thought with that of 
heroes who despised it. Upon what ground, is 
of small account ; if it be only the bishop who was 
burned for his faith in the antipodes, his memory 
lightens the heart and makes us walk undisturbed 
among graves. And so the martyrs' monument 
is a wholesome heartsome spot in the field of the 
dead; and as we look upon it, a brave influence 
comes to us from the land of those who have won 
their discharge and, in another phrase of Patrick 
Walker's, got " cleanly off the stage." 



EDINBURGH 45 

VI 

NEW TOWN — TOWN AND COUNTRY 

It is as much a matter of course to decry the 
New Town as to exalt the Old; and the most 
celebrated authorities have picked out this quarter 
as the very emblem of what is condemnable in 
architecture. Much may be said, much indeed has 
been said, upon the text; but to the unsophisti- 
cated, who call anything pleasing if it only pleases 
them, the New Town of Edinburgh seems, in 
itself, not only gay and airy, but highly pictur- 
esque. An old skipper, invincibly ignorant of all 
theories of the sublime and beautiful, once pro- 
pounded as his most radiant notion for Paradise : 
" The new town of Edinburgh, with the wind the 
matter of a point free." He has now gone to that 
sphere where all good tars are promised pleasant 
weather in the song, and perhaps his thoughts fly 
somewhat higher. But there are bright and tem- 
perate days — with soft air coming from the in- 
land hills, military music sounding bravely from the 
hollow of the gardens, the flags all waving on 
the palaces of Princes Street — when I have seen 
the town through a sort of glory, and shaken hands 
in sentiment with the old sailor. And indeed, for 
a man who has been much tumbled round Orca- 
dian skerries, what scene could be more agreeable 
to witness? On such a day, the valley wears a 
.surprising air of festival. It seems (I do not 



I 



46 EDINBURGH 

know how else to put my meaning) as if it were 
a trifle too good to be true. It is what Paris ought 
to be. It has the scenic quahty that would best 
set off a life of unthinking, open-air diversion. It 
was meant by nature for the realisation of the 
society of comic operas. And you can imagine, 
if the climate were but towardly, how all the world 
and his wife would flock into these gardens in the 
cool of the evening, to hear cheerful music, to sip 
pleasant drinks, to see the moon rise from behind 
Arthur's Seat and shine upon the spires and monu- 
ments and the green tree-tops in the valley. Alas ! 
and the next morning the rain is splashing on the 
window, and the passengers flee along Princes 
Street before the galloping squalls. 

It cannot be denied that the original design was 
faulty and short-sighted, and did not fully profit 
by the capabilities of the situation. The architect 
was essentially a town bird, and he laid out the 
modern city with a view to street scenery, and to 
street scenery alone. The country did not enter 
into his plan; he had never lifted his eyes to the 
hills. If he had so chosen, every street upon the 
northern slope might have been a noble terrace 
and commanded an extensive and beautiful view. 
But the space has been too closely built ; many of 
the houses front the wrong way, intent, like the 
Man with the Muck-Rake, on what is not worth 
observation, and standing discourteously back- 
foremost in the ranks ; and in a word, it is too 
often only from attic windows, or here and there 
at a crossing, that you can get a look beyond 



EDINBURGH 47 

the city upon its diversified surroundings. But 
perhaps it is all the more surprising, to come sud- 
denly on a corner, and see a perspective of a mile 
or more of falling street, and beyond that woods 
and villas, and a blue arm of sea, and the hills 
upon the farther side. 

Fergusson, our Edinburgh poet, Burns's model, 
once saw a butterfly at the Town Cross ; and the 
sight inspired him with a worthless little ode. This 
painted countryman, the dandy of the rose garden, 
looked far abroad in such a humming neighbour- 
hood; and you can fancy what moral considera- 
tions a youthful poet would supply. But the 
incident, in a fanciful sort of way, is character- 
istic of the place. Into no other city does the 
sight of the country enter so far; if you do not 
meet a butterfly, you shall certainly catch a glimpse 
of far-away trees upon your walk ; and the place 
is full of theatre tricks in the way of scenery. 
You peep under an arch, you descend stairs that 
look as if they would land you in a cellar, you 
turn to the back-window of a grimy tenement in 
a lane : — and behold ! you are face to face with 
distant and bright prospects. You turn a corner, 
and there is the sun going down into the High- 
land hills. You look down an alley, and see ships 
tacking for the Baltic. 

For the country people to see Edinburgh on her 
hilltops, is one thing; it is another for the citizen, 
from the thick of his affairs, to overlook the coun- 
try. It should be a genial and ameliorating in- 
fluence in life; it should prompt good thoughts 



48 EDINBURGH 

and remind him of Nature's unconcern : that he 
can watch from day to day, as he trots officeward, 
how the spring green brightens in the wood or the 
field grows black under a moving ploughshare. I 
have been tempted, in this connection, to deplore 
the slender faculties of the human race, with its 
penny-whistle of a voice, its dull ears, and its 
narrow range of sight. If you could see as 
people are to see in heaven, if you had eyes such 
as you can fancy for a superior race, if you could 
take clear note of the objects of vision, not only 
a few yards, but a few miles from where you 
stand : — think how agreeably your sight would 
be entertained, how pleasantly your thoughts would 
be diversified, as you walked the Edinburgh streets ! 
For you might pause, in some business perplexity, 
in the midst of the city traffic, and perhaps catch 
the eye of a shepherd as he sat down to breathe 
upon a heathery shoulder of the Pentlands; or 
perhaps some urchin, clambering in a country 
elm, would put aside the leaves and show you 
his flushed and rustic visage; or a fisher rac- 
ing seawards, with the tiller under his elbow, 
and the sail sounding in the wind, would fling 
you a salutation from between Anst'er and the 
May. 

To be old is not the same thing as to be pictur- 
esque; nor because the Old Town bears a strange 
physiognomy, does it at all follow that the New 
Town shall look commonplace. Indeed, apart from 
antique houses, it is curious how much descrip- 
tion would apply commonly to either. The same 



EDINBURGH 



49 



sudden accidents of ground, a similar dominating 
site above the plain, and the same superposition of 
one rank of society over another, are to be observed 
in both. Thus, the broad and comely approach to 
Princes Street from the east, lined with hotels and 
public offices, makes a leap over the gorge of the 
Low Calton ; if you cast a glance over the parapet, 
you look direct into that sunless and disreputable 
confluent of Leith Street ; and the same tall houses 
open upon both thoroughfares. This is only the 
New Town passing overhead above its own cellars ; 
walking, so to speak, over its own children, as is 
the way of cities and the human race. But at the 
Dean Bridge, you may behold a spectacle of a more 
novel order. The river runs at the bottom of a 
deep valley, among rocks and between gardens; 
the crest of either bank is occupied by some of 
the most commodious streets and crescents in the 
modern city; and a handsome bridge unites the 
two summits. Over this, every afternoon, private 
carriages go spinning by, and ladies with card- 
cases pass to and fro about the duties of society. 
And yet down below, you may still see, with its 
mills and foaming weir, the little rural village of 
Dean. Modern improvement has gone overhead 
on its high-level viaduct; and the extended city 
has cleanly overleapt, and left unaltered, what was 
once the summer retreat of its comfortable citizens. 
Every town embraces hamlets in its growth ; Edin- 
burgh herself has embraced a good few ; but it is 
strange to see one still surviving — and to see it 
some hundreds of feet below your path. Is it Torre 

4 



50 EDINBURGH 

del Greco that is built above buried Herculaneum? 
Herculaneum was dead at least; but the sun still 
shines upon the roofs of Dean ; the smoke still 
rises thriftily from its chimneys; the dusty miller 
comes to his door, looks at the gurgling water, 
hearkens to the turning wheel and the birds about 
the shed, and perhaps whistles an air of his 
own to enrich the symphony — for all the world 
as if Edinburgh were still the old Edinburgh 
on the Castle Hill, and Dean were still the quiet- 
est of hamlets buried a mile or so in the green 
country. 

It is not so long ago since magisterial David 
Hume lent the authority of his example to the 
exodus from the Old Town, and took up his new 
abode in a street which is still (so oddly may a 
jest become perpetuated) known as St. David 
Street. Nor is the town so large but a holiday 
school-boy may harry a bird's nest within half a 
mile of his own door. There are places that still 
smell of the plough in memory's nostrils. Here, 
one had heard a blackbird on a hawthorn; there, 
another was taken on summer evenings to eat 
strawberries and cream; and you have seen a 
waving wheatfield on the site of your present resi- 
dence. The memories of an Edinburgh boy are 
but partly memories of the town. I look^ back 
with delight on many an escalade of garden walls ; 
many a ramble among lilacs full of piping birds ; 
many an exploration in obscure quarters that were 
neither town nor country; and I think that both 
for my companions and myself, there was a special 



EDINBURGH 51 

interest, a point of romance, and a sentiment as 
of foreign travel, when we hit in our excursions 
on the butt end of some former liamlet, and found 
a few rustic cottages embedded among streets and 
squares. The tunnel to the Scotland Street Station, 
the sight of the trains shooting out of its dark 
maw with the two guards upon the brake, the 
thought of its length and the many ponderous 
edifices and open thoroughfares above, were cer- 
tainly things of paramount impressiveness to a 
young mind. It was a subterranean passage, al- 
though of a larger bore than we were accustomed 
to in Ainsworth's novels ; and these two words, 
" subterranean passage," were in themselves an ir- 
resistible attraction, and seemed to bring us nearer 
in spirit to the heroes we loved and the black ras- 
cals we secretly aspired to imitate. To scale the 
Castle Rock from West Princes Street Gardens, 
and lay a triumphal hand against the rampart 
itself, was to taste a high order of romantic pleas- 
ure. And there are other sights and exploits which 
crowd back upon my mind under a very strong 
illumination of remembered pleasure. But the 
efifect of not one of them all wall compare with the 
discoverer's joy, and the sense of old Time and his 
slow changes on the face of this earth, with which 
I explored such corners as Cannonmills or Water 
Lane, or the nugget of cottages at Broughton 
Market. They were more rural than the open 
country, and gave a greater impression of antiq- 
uity than the oldest land upon the High Street. 
They too, like Fergusson's butterfly, had a cjuaint 



52 EDINBURGH 

air of having wandered far from their own place; 
they looked abashed and homely, with their gables 
and their creeping plants, their outside stairs and 
running mill-streams ; there were corners that smelt 
like the end of the country garden where I spent 
my Aprils ; and the people stood to gossip at their 
doors, as they might have done in Colinton or 
Cramond. 

In a great measure we may, and shall, eradicate 
this haunting flavour of the country. The last elm 
is dead in Elm Row ; and the villas and the work- 
men's quarters spread apace on all the borders of 
the city. We can cut down the trees ; we can bury 
the grass under dead paving-stones; we can drive 
brisk streets through all our sleepy quarters ; and 
we may forget the stories and the playgrounds of 
our boyhood. But we have some possessions that 
not even the infuriate zeal of builders can utterly 
abolish and destroy. Nothing can abolish the hills, 
unless it be a cataclysm of nature which shall sub- 
vert Edinburgh Castle itself and lay all her florid 
structures in the dust. And as long as we have the 
hills and the Firth, we have a famous heritage to 
leave our children. Our yvindows, at no expense 
to us, are mostly artfully stained to represent a 
landscape. And when the spring comes round, 
and the hawthorn begins to flower, and the 
meadows to smell of young grass, even in the 
thickest of our streets, the country hilltops find 
out a young man's eyes, and set his heart beating 
for travel and pure air. 



EDINBURGH 53 

VII 

THE VILLA QUARTERS 

Mr. Ruskin's denunciation of the New Town 
of Edinburgh includes, as I have heard it repeated, 
nearly all the stone and lime we have to show. 
Many however find a grand air and something 
settled and imposing in the better parts ; and upon 
many, as I have said, the confusion of styles in- 
duces an agreeable stimulation of the mind. But 
upon the subject of our recent villa architecture, I 
am frankly ready to mingle my tears with Mr. 
Ruskin's, and it is a subject which makes one 
envious of his large declamatory and controversial 
eloquence. 

Day by day, one new villa, one new object of 
offence, is added to another; all around New- 
ington and Morningside, the dismallest struc- 
tures keep springing up like mushrooms ; the 
pleasant hills are loaded with them, each impu- 
dently squatted in its garden, each roofed and 
carrying chimneys like a house. And yet a 
glance of an eye discovers their true character. 
They are not houses ; for they were not designed 
with a view to human habitation, and the inter- 
nal arrangements are, as they tell me, fantasti- 
cally unsuited to the needs of man. They are 
not buildings; for you can scarcely say a thing 
is built where every measurement is in clamant 
disproportion with its neighbour. They belong 



54 EDINBURGH 

to no style of art, only to a form of business 
much to be regretted. 

Why should it be cheaper to erect a structure 
where the size of the windows bears no rational 
relation to the size of the front? Is there any 
profit in a misplaced chimney-stalk? Does a 
hard-working, greedy builder gain more on a 
monstrosity than on a decent cottage of equal 
plainness? Frankly, we should say. No. Bricks 
may be omitted, and green timber employed, in 
the construction of even a very elegant design ; and 
there is no reason why a chimney should be made 
to vent, because it is so situated as to look comely 
from without. On the other hand, there is a noble 
way of being ugly : a high-aspiring fiasco like the 
fall of Lucifer. There are daring and gaudy build- 
ings that manage to be offensive, without being 
contemptible ; and we know that " fools rush in 
where angels fear to tread." But to aim at making 
a commonplace villa, and to make it insufferably 
ugly in each particular; to attempt the homeliest 
achievement and to attain the bottom of derided 
failure; not to have any theory but profit and yet, 
at an equal expense, to outstrip all competitors in 
the art of conceiving and rendering permanent 
deformity; and to do all this in what is, by na- 
ture, one of the most agreeable neighbourhoods 
in Britain : — what are we to say, but that this 
also is a distinction, hard to earn although not 
greatly worshipful ? 

Indifferent buildings give pain to the sensitive ; 
but these things offend the plainest taste. It is a 



EDINBURGH 55 

danger which threatens the amenity of the town; 
and as this eruption keeps spreading on our bor- 
ders, we have ever the farther to walk among un- 
pleasant sights, before we gain the country air. 
If the population of Edinburgh were a living, 
autonomous body, it would arise like one man and 
make night hideous with arson; the builders and 
their accomplices would be driven to work, like 
the Jews of yore, with the trowel in one hand and 
the defensive cutlass in the other; and as soon as 
one of these masonic wonders had been consum- 
mated, right-minded iconoclasts should fall thereon 
and make an end of it at once. 

Possibly these words may meet the eye of a 
builder or two. It is no use asking them to em- 
ploy an architect ; for that would be to touch them 
in a delicate quarter, and its use would largely 
depend on what architect they were minded to call 
in. But let them get any architect in the world 
to point out any reasonably well-proportioned villa, 
not his own design; and let them reproduce that 
model to satiety. 

VIII 
THE CALTON HILL 

The east of new Edinburgh is guarded by a 
craggy hill, of no great elevation, which the town 
embraces. The old London road runs on one side 
of it; while the New Approach, leaving it on the 
other hand, completes the circuit. You mount by 



S6 EDINBURGH ' 

stairs in a cutting of the rock to find yourself in 
a field of monuments. Dugald Stewart has the 
honours of situation and architecture; Burns is 
memorialised lower down upon a spur; Lord Nel- 
son, as befits a sailor, gives his name to the top- 
gallant of the Calton Hill. This latter erection 
has been differently and yet, in both cases, aptly 
compared to a telescope and a butter-churn ; com- 
parisons apart, it ranks among the vilest of men's 
handiworks. But the chief feature is an unfinished 
range of columns, " the Modern Ruin " as it has 
been called, an imposing object from far and near, 
and giving Edinburgh, even from the sea, that 
false air of a Modern Athens which has earned 
for her so many slighting speeches. It was meant 
to be a National Monument ; and its present state 
is a very suitable monument to certain national 
characteristics. The old Observatory — a quaint 
brown building on the edge of the steep — and the 
new Observatory — a classical edifice with a dome 
— occupy the central portion of the summit. All 
these are scattered on a green turf, browsed over 
by some sheep. 

The scene suggests reflections on fame and on 
man's injustice to the dead. You see Dugald 
Stewart rather more handsomely commemorated 
than Burns. Immediately below, in the Canon- 
gate churchyard, lies Robert Fergusson, Burns's 
master in his art, who died insane while yet a 
stripling; and if Dugald Stewart has been some- 
what too boisterously acclaimed, the Edinburgh 
poet, on the other hand, is most unrighteously 



EDINBURGH 57 

forgotten. The votaries of Burns, a crew too com- 
mon in all ranks in Scotland and more remark- 
able for number than discretion, eagerly suppress 
all mention of the lad who handed to him the poetic 
impulse and, up to the time when he grew famous, 
continued to influence him in his manner and the 
choice of subjects. Burns himself not only ac- 
knowledged his debt in a fragment of autobiog- 
raphy, but erected a tomb over the grave in 
Canongate churchyard. This was worthy of an 
artist, but it was done in vain ; and although I 
think I have read nearly all the biographies of 
Burns, I cannot remember one in which the mod- 
esty of nature was not violated, or where Fergus- 
son was not sacrificed to the credit of his follower's 
originality. There is a kind of gaping admiration 
that would fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into 
one, to have a bigger thing to gape at ; and a class 
of men who cannot edit one author without dis- 
paraging all others. They are indeed mistaken if 
they think to please the great originals ; and who- 
ever puts Fergusson right with fame, cannot do 
better than dedicate his labours to the memory 
of Burns, who will be the best delighted of the 
dead. 

Of all places for a view, this Calton Hill is per- 
haps the best ; since you can see the Castle, which 
you lose from the Castle, and Arthur's Seat, which 
you cannot see from Arthur's Seat. It is the place 
to stroll on one of those days of sunshine and east 
wind which are so common in our more than tem- 
perate summer. The breeze comes off the sea. 



58 EDINBURGH 

with a little of the freshness, and that touch of chill, 
peculiar to the quarter, which is delightful to cer- 
tain very ruddy organisations and greatly the re- 
verse to the majority of mankind. It brings with 
it a faint, floating haze, a cunning decolouriser, 
although not thick enough to obscure outlines near 
at hand. But the haze lies more thickly to wind- 
ward at the far end of Musselburgh Bay ; and over 
the Links of Aberlady and Berwick Law and the 
hump of the Bass Rock it assumes the aspect of a 
bank of thin sea-fog. 

Immediately underneath upon the south, you 
command the yards of the High School, and the 
towers and courts of the new Jail — a large place, 
castellated to the extent of folly, standing by itself 
on the edge of a steep cliff, and often joyfully 
hailed by tourists as the Castle. In the one, you 
may perhaps see female prisoners taking exercise 
like a string of nuns ; in the other, school-boys 
running at play and their shadows keeping step 
with them. From the bottom of the valley, a 
gigantic chimney rises almost to the level of the 
eye, a taller and a shapelier edifice than Nelson's 
Monument. Look a little farther, and there is 
Holyrood Palace, with its Gothic frontal and 
ruined abbey, and the red sentry pacing smartly to 
and fro before the door like a mechanical figure in 
a panorama. By way of an outpost, you can single 
out the little peak-roofed lodge, over which Rizzio's 
murderers made their escape and where Queen 
Mary herself, according to gossip, bathed in white 
wine to entertain her loveliness. Behind and over- 



EDINBURGH 59 

head, lie the Queen's Park, from Miischat's Cairn 
to Dumbiedykes, St. Margaret's Loch, and the long 
wall of Salisbury Crags ; and thence, by knoll and 
rocky bulwark and precipitous slope, the eye rises to 
the top of Arthur's Seat, a hill for magnitude, a 
mountain in virtue of its bold design. This upon 
your left. Upon the right, the roofs and spires of 
the Old Town climb one above another to where 
the citadel prints its broad bulk and jagged crown 
of bastions on the western sky. Perhaps it is now 
one in the afternoon; and at the same instant of 
time, a ball rises to the summit of Nelson's flagstaff 
close at hand, and, far away, a puff of smoke fol- 
lowed by a report bursts from the half-moon bat- 
tery at the Castle. This is the time-gun by which 
people set their watches, as far as the sea-coast or 
in hill farms upon the Pentlands. To complete the 
view, the eye enfilades Princes Street, black with 
traffic, and has a broad look over the valley be- 
tween the Old Town and the New : here, full of 
railway trains and stepped over by the high North 
Bridge upon its many columns, and there, green 
with trees and gardens. 

On the north, the Carlton Hill is neither so 
abrupt in itself nor has it so exceptional an outlook; 
and yet even here it commands a striking prospect. 
A gully separates it from the New Town. This is 
Greenside, where witches were burned and tourna- 
ments held in former days. Down that almost pre- 
cipitous bank, Bothwell launched his horse, and so 
first, as they say, attracted the bright eyes of Mary. 
It is now tesselated with sheets and blankets out 



6o EDINBURGH 

to dry, and the sound of people beating carpets is 
rarely absent. Beyond all this, the suburbs run 
out to Leith; Leith camps on the seaside with her 
forest of masts; Leith roads are full of ships at 
anchor; the sun picks out the white pharos upon 
Inchkeith Island ; the Firth extends on either hand 
from the Ferry to the May ; the towns of Fife- 
shire sit, each in its bank of blowing smoke, along 
the opposite coast; and the hills enclose the view, 
except to the farthest east, where the haze of the 
horizon rests upon the open sea. There lies the 
road to Norway : a dear road for Sir Patrick 
Spens and his Scots Lords ; and yonder smoke on 
the hither side of Largo Law is Aberdour, from 
whence they sailed to seek a queen for Scotland. 

" O lang, lang, may the ladies sit, 
Wi' their fans into their hand, 
Or ere they see Sir Patrick Spens 
Come sailing to the land ! " 

The sight of the sea, even from a city, will bring 
thoughts of storm and sea-disaster. The sailors' 
wives of Leith and the fisherwomen of Cockenzie, 
not sitting languorously with fans, but crowding 
to the tail of the harbour with a shawl about their 
ears, may still look vainly for brave Scotsmen who 
will return no more, or boats that have gone on 
their last fishing. Since Sir Patrick sailed from 
Aberdour, what a multitude have gone down in the 
North Sea ! Yonder is Auldhame, where the Lon- 
don smack went ashore and wreckers cut the rings 
from ladies' fingers; and a few miles round Fife 



ED I N BU RGH 6i 

Ness is the fatal Inchcape, now a star of guidance ; 
and the lee shore to the east of the Inchcape is that 
Forfarshire coast where Mucklebackit sorrowed for 
his son. 

These are the main features of the scene roughly 
*i sketched. How they are all tilted by the inclination 
of the ground, how each stands out in delicate 
relief against the rest, what manifold detail, and 
play of sun and shadow, animate and accentuate 
the picture, is a matter for a person on the spot, and 
turning swiftly on his heels, to grasp and bind to- 
gether in one comprehensive look. It is the char- 
acter of such a prospect, to be full of change and 
of things moving. The multiplicity embarrasses 
the eye; and the mind, among so much, suffers 
itself to grow absorbed with single points. You 
remark a tree in a hedgerow, or follow a cart along 
a country road. You turn to the city, and see 
children, dwarfed by distance into pigmies, at play 
about suburban doorsteps ; you have a glimpse 
upon a thoroughfare where people are densely 
moving; you note ridge after ridge of chimney- 
stacks running down-hill one behind another, and 
church spires rising bravely from the sea of roofs. 
At one of the innumerable windows, you watch 
a figure moving; on one of the multitude of roofs, 
you watch clambering chimney-sweeps. The wind 
takes a run and scatters the smoke ; bells are heard, 
far and near, faint and loud, to tell the hour; or 
perhaps a bird goes dipping evenly over the house- 
tops, like a gull across the waves. And here you 
are in the meantime, on this pastoral hillside, among 



I 



62 EDINBURGH 

nibbling sheep and looked upon by monumental 
buildings. 

Return thither on some clear, dark, moonless 
night, with a ring of frost in the air, and only a 
star or two set sparsedly in the vault of heaven; 
and you will find a sight as stimulating as the 
hoariest summit of the Alps. The solitude seems 
perfect ; the patient astronomer, flat on his back 
under the Observatory dome and spying heaven's 
secrets, is your only neighbour ; and yet from all 
round you there come up the dull hum of the city, 
the tramp of countless people marching out of time, 
the rattle of carriages and the continuous keen 
jingle of the tramway bells. An hour or so before, 
the gas was turned on ; lamplighters scoured the 
city ; in every house, from kitchen to attic, the 
windows kindled and gleamed forth into the dusk. 
And so now, although the town lies blue and dark- 
ling on her hills, innumerable spots of the bright 
element shine far and near along the pavements 
and upon the high fagades. Moving lights of the 
railway pass and repass below the stationary lights 
upon the bridge. Lights burn in the Jail. Lights 
burn high up in the tall lands and on the Castle 
turrets, they burn low down in Greenside or along 
the Park. They run out one beyond the other into 
the dark country. They walk in a procession down 
to Leith, and shine singly far along Leith Pier. 
Thus, the plan of the city and her suburbs is 
mapped out upon the ground of blackness, as when 
a child pricks a drawing full of pin-holes and ex- 
poses it before a candle; not the darkest night of 



EDINBURGH 63 

winter can conceal her high station and fanciful 
design ; every evening in the year she proceeds to 
illuminate herself in honour of her own beauty; 
and as if to complete the scheme — or rather as if 
some prodigal Pharaoh were beginning to extend 
to the adjacent sea and country — half-way over to 
Fife, there is an outpost of light upon Inchkeith, 
and far to seaward, yet another on the May. 

And while you are looking, across upon the Cas- 
tle Hill, the drums and bugles begin to recall the 
scattered garrison; the air thrills with the sound; 
the bugles sing aloud; and the last rising flourish 
mounts and melts into the darkness like a star: a 
martial swan-song, fitly rounding in the labours of 
the day. 

IX 

WINTER AND NEW YEAR 

The Scotch dialect is singularly rich in terms 
of reproach against the winter wind. Sncll, hlae, 
nirly, and scowthering are four of these significant 
vocables; they are all words that carry a shiver 
with them ; and for my part, as I see them aligned 
before me on the page, I am persuaded that a big 
wind comes tearing over the Firth from Burnt- 
island and the northern hills; I think I can hear it 
howl in the chimney, and as I set my face north- 
wards, feel its smarting kisses on my cheek. Even 
in the names of places there is often a desolate, 
inhospitable sound; and I remember two from the 



64 EDINBURGH 

near neighbourhood of Edinburgh, Cauldhame and 
Blawweary, that would promise but starving com- 
fort to their inhabitants. The inclemency of heaven, 
which has thus endowed the language of Scotland 
with words, has also largely modified the spirit 
of its poetry. Both poverty and a northern climate 
teach men the love of the hearth and the sentiment 
of the family; and the latter, in its own right, in- 
clines a poet to the praise of strong waters. In 
Scotland, all our singers have a stave or two for 
blazing fires and stout potations : — to get indoors 
out of the wind and to swallow something hot 
to the stomach, are benefits so easily appreciated 
where they dwelt ! 

And this is not only so in country districts where 
the shepherd must wade in the snow all day after 
his flock, but in Edinburgh itself, and nowhere 
more apparently stated than in the works of our 
Edinburgh poet, Fergusson. He was a delicate 
youth, I take it, and willingly slunk from the robus- 
tious winter to an inn fireside. Love was absent 
from his life, or only present, if you prefer, in 
such a form that even the least serious of Burns's 
amourettes was ennobling by comparison; and so 
there is nothing to temper the sentiment of indoor 
revelry which pervades the poor boy's verses. 
Although it is characteristic of his native town, and 
the manners of its youth to the present day, this 
spirit has perhaps done something to restrict his 
popularity. He recalls a supper-party pleasantry 
Vi/ith something akin to tenderness; and sounds 
the praises of the act of drinking as if it were 



EDINBURGH 65 

virtuous, or at least witty, in itself. The kindly jar, 
the warm atmosphere of tavern parlours, and the 
revelry of lawyers' clerks, do not offer by them- 
I selves the materials of a rich existence. It was not 
choice, so much as an external fate, that kept Fer- 
gusson in this round of sordid pleasures. A Scot 
of poetic temperament, and without religious exal- 
tation, drops as if by nature into the public-house. 
The picture may not be pleasing; but what else is 
a man to do in this dog's weather? 

To none but those who have themselves suffered 
the thing in the body, can the gloom and depression 
of our Edinburgh winter be brought home. For 
some constitutions there is something almost physi- 
cally disgusting in the bleak ugliness of easterly 
weather; the wind wearies, the sickly sky de- 
presses them ; and they turn back from their walk 
to avoid the aspect of the unrefulgent sun going 
down among perturbed and pallid mists. The days 
are so short that a man does much of his business, 
and certainly all his pleasure, by the haggard glare 
of gas lamps. The roads are as heavy as a fallow. 
People go by, so drenched and draggle-tailed that 
I have often wondered how they found the heart to 
undress. And meantime the wind whistles through 
the town as if it were an open meadow; and if 
you lie awake all night, yoti hear it shrieking and 
raving overhead with a noise of shipwrecks and 
of falling houses. In a word, life is so unsightly 
that there are times when the heart turns sick in 
a man's inside ; and the look of a tavern, or the 
thought of the warm, fire-lit study, is like the touch 

5 



66 EDINBURGH 

of land to one who has been long struggling with 
the seas. 

As the weather hardens towards frost, the world 
begins to im])rove for Edinburgh people. We en- 
joy superb, sub-arctic sunsets, with the profile of 
the city stamped in indigo upon a sky of luminous 
green. The wind may still be cold, but there is 
a briskness in the air that stirs good blood. People 
do not all look equally sour and downcast. They 
fall into two divisions : one, the knight of the blue 
face and hollow paunch, whom winter has gotten 
by the vitals ; the other well lined with New Year's 
fare, conscious of the touch of cold on his periph- 
ery, but stepping through it by the glow of his 
internal fires. Such an one I remember, triply 
cased in grease, whom no extremity of tempera- 
ture could vanquish. " Well," would be his jovial 
salutation, "here's a sneezer!" And the look of 
these warm fellows is tonic, and upholds their 
drooping fellow-townsmen. There is yet another 
class who do not depend on corporal advantages, 
but support the winter in virtue of a brave and 
merry heart. One shivering evening, cold enough 
for frost but with too high a wind, and a little past 
sundown, when the lamps were beginning to en- 
large their circles in the growing dusk, a brace of 
barefoot lassies were seen coming eastward in tlie 
teeth of the wind. If the one was as much as nine, 
the other was certainly not more than seven. They 
were miserably clad ; and the pavement was so 
cold, you would ha\'e thought no one could lay a 
naked foot on it unHinching. Yet they came along 



EDINBURGH 67 

waltzing, if you please, while the elder sang a time 
to give them music. The person who saw this, and 
whose heart was full of bitterness at the moment, 
pocketed a reproof which has been of use to him 
ever since, and which he now hands on, with his 
good wishes, to the reader. 

At length, Edinburgh, with her satellite hills, and 
all the sloping country, are sheeted up in white. 
If it has happened in the dark hours, nurses pluck 
their children out of bed and run with them to 
some commanding window, whence they may see 
the change that has been worked upon earth's face. 
" A' the hills are covered wi' snaw," they sing, 
"and winter's noo come fairly!" And the chil- 
dren, marvelling at the silence and the white land- 
scape, find a spell appropriate to the season in the 
words. The reverberation of the snow increases 
the pale da3dight, and brings all objects nearer the 
eye. The Pentlands are smooth and glittering, 
with here and there the black ribbon of a dry- 
stone dyke, and here and there, if there be wind, 
a cloud of blowing snow upon a shoulder. The 
Firth seems a leaden creek, that a man might 
almost jump across, between well-powdered Lo- 
thian and well-powdered Fife. And the effect is 
not, as in other cities, a thing of half a day ; the 
streets are soon trodden black, but the country 
keeps its virgin white ; and you have only to lift 
your eyes and look oxev miles of country snow. 
An indescribable cheerfulness breathes about the 
city; and the well-fed heart sits lightly and beats 
gaily in the bosom. It is New Year's weather. 



68 EDINBURGH 

New Year's Day, the great national festival, is 
a time of family expansions and of deep carousal. 
Sometimes, by a sore stroke of fate for this Calvin- 
istic people, the year's anniversary, falls upon a 
Sunday, when the public-houses are inexorably 
closed, when singing and even whistling is banished 
from our homes and highways, and the oldest 
toper feels called upon to go to church. Thus 
pulled about, as if between two loyalties, the Scotch 
have to decide many nice cases of conscience, and 
ride the marches narrowly between the weekly 
and the annual observance. A party of convivial 
musicians, next door to a friend of mine, hung sus- 
pended in this manner on the brink of their diver- 
sions. From ten o'clock on Sunday night, my 
friend heard them tuning their instruments ; and 
as the hour of liberty drew near, each must have 
had his music open, his bow in readiness across the 
fiddle, his foot already raised to mark the time, 
and his nerves braced for execution ; for hardly 
had the twelfth stroke sounded from the earliest 
steeple before they had launched forth into a sec- 
ular bravura. 

Currant-loaf is now popular eating in all house- 
holds. For weeks before the great morning, con- 
fectioners display stacks of Scotch bun — a dense, 
black substance, inimical to life — and full moons 
of shortbread adorned with mottoes of peel or 
sugar-plum, in honour of the season and the 
family affections. " Frae Auld Reekie," " A 
guid New Year to ye a'," " For the Auld Folk at 
Hame," are among the most favoured of these 



EDINBURGH 69 

devices. Can you not see the carrier, after half a 
day's journey on pinching hiU-roads, draw up be- 
fore a cottage in Teviotdale, or perhaps in Manor 
Glen among the rowans, and the old people receiv- 
ing the parcel with moist eyes and a prayer for Jock 
or Jean in the city? For at this season, on the 
threshold of another year of calamity and stubborn 
conflict, men feel a need to draw closer the links 
that unite them ; they reckon the number of their 
friends, like allies before a war ; and the prayers 
grow longer in the morning as the absent are 
recommended by name into God's keeping. 

On the day itself, the shops are all shut as on a 
Sunday; only taverns, toyshops, and other holi- 
day magazines keep open doors. Every one looks 
for his handsel. The postmen and the lamplighters 
have left, at every house in their districts, a copy of 
vernacular verses, asking and thanking in a breath ; 
and it is characteristic of Scotland that these verses 
may have sometimes a touch of reality in detail 
or sentiment and a measure of strength in the 
handling. All over the town, you may see com- 
forter'd school-boys hasting to squander their half- 
crowns. There are an infinity of visits to be paid ; 
all the world is in the street, except the daintier 
classes ; the sacramental greeting is heard upon 
all sides; Auld Lang Syne is much in people's 
mouths ; and whisky and shortbread are staple 
articles of consumption. From an early hour a 
stranger will be impressed by the number of 
drunken men ; and by afternoon drunkenness 
has spread to the women. With some classes of 



yo EDINBURGH 

society, it is as much a matter of duty to drink hard 
on New Year's Day as to go to church on Sunday. 
Some have been saving their wages for perhaps a 
month to do the season honour. Many carry a 
whisky-bottle in their pocket, which they wih press 
with embarrassing effusion on a perfect stranger. 
It is inexpedient to risk one's body in a cab, or not, 
at least, until after a prolonged study of the driver. 
The streets, which are thronged from end to end, 
become a place for delicate pilotage. Singly or 
arm in arm, some speechless, others noisy and 
quarrelsome, the votaries of the New Year go 
meandering in and out and cannoning one against 
another ; and now and again, one falls and lies as 
he has fallen. Before night, so many have gone to 
bed or the police office, that the streets seem almost 
clearer. And as giiisards and first-footers are now 
not much seen except in country places, when 
once the New Year has been rung in and pro- 
claimed at the Tron railings, the festivities begin 
to find their way indoors and something like quiet 
returns upon the town. But think, in these piled 
lands, of all the senseless snorers, all the broken 
heads and empty pockets ! 

Of old, Edinburgh University was tlie scene of 
heroic snowballing ; and one riot obtained the epic 
honours of military intervention. But the great 
generation, I am afraid, is at an end ; and even 
during my own college days, the spirit appreciably 
declined. Skating and sliding, on the other hand, 
are honoured more and more ; and curling, being a 
creature of the national genus, is little likely to 



<l 



EDINBURGH 71 

be disregarded. The patriotism that leads a man 
to eat Scotch bun will scarce desert him at the 
curling-pond. Edinburgh, with its long, steep 
pavements, is the proper home of sliders ; many 
a happy urchin can slide the whole way to school ; 
and the profession of errand boy is transformed 
into a holiday amusement. As for skating, there 
is scarce any city so handsomely provided. Dud- 
dingstone Loch lies under the abrupt southern side 
of Arthur's Seat ; in summer, a shield of blue, with 
swans sailing from the reeds ; in winter, a field of 
ringing ice. The village church sits above it on 
a green promontory and the village smoke rises 
from among goodly trees. At the church gates, is 
the historical joitg, a place of penance for the neck 
of detected sinners, and the historical lonping-on 
stanc, from which Dutch-built lairds and farmers 
climbed into the saddle. Here Prince Charlie slept 
before the battle of Prestonpans ; and here Deacon 
Brodie, or one of his gang, stole a plough coulter 
before the burglary in Chessel's Court. On the 
opposite side of the locli, the ground rises to Craig- 
millar Castle, a place friendly to Stuart Mariolaters. 
It is worth a climb, even in summer, to look down 
upon the loch from Arthur's Seat ; but it is tenfold 
more so on a day of skating. The surface is thick 
with people moving easily and swiftly and leaning 
over at a thousand graceful inclinations ; the crowd 
opens and closes, and keeps moving through itself 
like water; and the ice rings to half a mile away, 
with the flying steel. As night draws on, the single 
figures melt into the dusk, until only an obscure 



72 EDINBURGH 

stir and coming and going of l^lack clusters, is 
visible upon the loch. A little longer, and the 
first torch is kindled and begins to flit rapidly 
across the ice in a ring of yellow reflection, and this 
is followed by another and another, until the whole 
field is full of skimming lights. 

X 

TO THE PENTLAND HILLS 

On three sides of Edinburgh, the country slopes 
downward from the city, here to the sea, there to 
the fat farms of Haddington, there to the mineral 
fields of Linlithgow. On the south alone, it keeps 
rising until it not only out-tops the Castle but 
looks down on Arthur's Seat. The character of 
the neighbourhood is pretty strongly marked by a 
scarcity of hedges ; by many stone walls of vary- 
ing heights ; by a fair amount of timber, some of 
it well grown, but apt to be of a bushy, northern 
profile and poor in foliage; by here and there a 
little river, Esk or Leith or Almond, busily jour- 
neying in the bottom of its glen ; and from almost 
every point, by a peep of the sea or the hills. 
There is no lack of variety, and yet most of the 
elements are common to all parts ; and the southern 
district is alone distinguished by considerable sum- 
mits and a wide view. 

From Boroughmuirhead, where the Scottish army 
encamped before Flodden, the road descends a 
long hill, at the bottom of which and just as it is 



EDINBURGH 73 

preparing to mount upon the other side, it passes a 
toll-bar and issues at once into the open country. 
Even as I write these words, they are being anti- 
quated in the progress of events, and the chisels are 
tinkling on a new row of houses. The builders 
have at length adventured beyond the toll which 
held them in respect so long, and proceed to 
career in these fresh pastures like a herd of colts 
turned loose. As Lord Beaconsfield proposed to 
hang an architect by way of stimulation, a man, 
looking on these doomed meads, imagines a similar 
example to deter the builders ; for it seems as if it 
must come to an open fight at last to preserve a 
corner of green country unbedevilled. And here, 
appropriately enough, there stood in old days a 
crow-haunted gibbet, with two bodies hanged in 
chains. I used to be shown, when a child, a flat 
stone in the roadway to which the gibbet had been 
fixed. People of a willing fancy were persuaded, 
and sought to persuade others, that this stone was 
never dry. And no wonder, they would add, for 
the two men had only stolen fourpence between 
them. 

For about two miles the road climbs upwards, 
a long hot walk in summer time. You reach the 
summit at a place where four ways meet, beside 
the toll of Fairmilehead. The spot is breezy and 
agreeable both in name and aspect. The hills are 
close by across a valley : Kirk Yetton, with its 
long, upright scars visible as far as Fife, and 
Allermuir the tallest on this side: with wood 
and tilled field running high upon their borders, and 



74 EDINBURGH 

haunches all moulded into innumerable glens and 
shelvings and variegated with heather and fern. 
The air comes briskly and sweetly off the hills, pure 
from the elevation and rustically scented by the 
upland plants ; and even at the toll, you may hear 
the curlew calling on its mate. At certain seasons, 
when the gulls desert their surfy forelands, the 
birds of sea and mountain hunt and scream to- 
gether in the same field at Fairmilehead. The 
winged, wild things intermix their wdieelings, the 
sea-birds skim the tree-tops and fish among the fur- 
rows of the plough. These little craft of air are 
at home in all the world, so long as they cruise in 
their own element ; and like sailors, ask but food 
and water from the shores they coast. 

Below% over a stream, the road passes Bow 
Bridge, now a dairy-farm, but once a distillery of 
whisky. It chanced, some time in the past century, 
that the distiller was on terms of good-fellowship 
with the visiting officer of excise. The latter was 
of an easy, friendly disposition and a master of 
convivial arts. Now and again, he had to walk 
out of Edinburgh to measure the distiller's stock ; 
and although it was agreeable to find his business 
lead him in a friend's direction, it was unfortunate 
that the friend should be a loser by his visits. Ac- 
cordingly, when he got about the level of Fair- 
milehead, the gauger would take his flute, without 
which he never travelled, from his pocket, fit it 
together, and set manfully to playing, as if for his 
own delectation and inspired by the beauty of the 
scene. His favourite air, it seems, was " Over the 



EDINBURGH 75 

hills and far away." At the first note, the distiller 
pricked his ears. A tiute at Fairmilehead ? and 
playing " Over the hills and far away " ? This 
must be his friendly enemy, the ganger. Instantly, 
horses were harnessed, and sundry barrels of 
whisky were got upon a cart, driven at a gallop 
round Hill End, and buried in the mossy glen be- 
hind Kirk Yetton. In the same breath, you may 
be sure, a fat fowl was put to the fire, and the 
whitest napery prepared for the back parlour. A 
little after, the ganger, having had his fill of music 
for the moment, came strolling down with the 
most innocent air imaginable, and found the good 
people at Bow Bridge taken entirely unawares by 
his arrival, but none the less glad to see him. The 
distiller's liquor and the ganger's flute would com- 
bine to speed the moments of digestion ; and when 
both were somewhat mellow, they would wind up 
the evening with " Over the hills and far away " 
to an accompaniment of knowing glances. And at 
least, there is a smuggling story, with original and 
half-idyllic features. 

A little further, the road to the right passes an 
upright stone in a field. The country people call it 
General Kay's monument. According to them, an 
officer of that name had perished there in battle at 
some indistinct period before the beginning of his- 
tory. The date is reassuring ; for I think cautious 
writers are silent on the General's exploits. But 
the stone is connected with one of those remarkable 
tenures of land which linger on into the modern 
world from Feudalism. Whenever the reigning 



76 EDINBURGH 

sovereign passes by, a certain landed proprietor is 
held bound to climb on to the top, trumpet in hand, 
and sound a flourish according to the measure of 
his knowledge in that art. Happily for a respect- 
able family, crowned heads have no great business 
in the Pentland Hills. But the story lends a char- 
acter of comicality to the stone; and the passer-by 
will sometimes chuckle to himself. 

The district is dear to the superstitious. Hard 
by, at the back-gate of Comiston, a belated carter 
beheld a lady in white, " with the most beautiful, 
clear shoes upon her feet," who looked upon him 
in a very ghastly manner and then vanished ; and 
just in front is the Hunters' Tryst, once a roadside 
inn, and not so long ago haunted by the devil in 
person. Satan led the inhabitants a pitiful exist- 
ence. He shook the four corners of the building 
with lamentable outcries, beat at the doors and win- 
dows, overthrew crockery in the dead hours of the 
morning, and danced unholy dances on the roof. 
Every kind of spiritual disinfectant was put in 
requisition ; chosen ministers were summoned out 
of Edinburgh and prayed by the hour; pious 
neighbours sat up all night making a noise of 
psalmody; but Satan minded them no more than 
the wind about the hilltops; and it was only after 
years of persecution, that he left the Hunters' 
Tryst in peace to occupy himself with the remainder 
of mankind. What with General Kay, and the 
white lady, and this singular visitation, the neigh- 
bourhood ofTers great facilities to the makers of 
sun-myths ; and without exactly casting in one's 



EDINBURGH 77 

lot with that disenchanting school of writers, one 
:annot help hearing a good deal of the winter wind 
in the last story. " That nicht," says Burns, in one 
, ji his happiest moments, — 

" T/uii nicht a child /night understand 
The deil had bttsiness on his hand.'''' 

And if people sit up all night in lone places on the 
hills, with Bibles and tremulous psalms, they will 
be apt to hear some of the most fiendish noises in 
the world : the wind will beat on doors and dance 
upon roofs for them, and make the hills howl 
around their cottage with a clamour like the Judg- 
ment Day. 

The road goes down through another valley, and 
then finally begins to scale the main slope of the 
Pentlands. A bouquet of old trees stands round a 
white farmhouse ; and from a neighbouring dell, 
you can see smoke rising and leaves ruffling in 
the breeze. Straight above, the hills climb a thou- 
sand feet into the air. The neighbourhood, about 
the time of lambs, is clamorous with the bleating 
of flocks; and you will be awakened, in the grey 
of early summer mornings, by the barking of a 
dog or the voice of a shepherd shouting to the 
echoes. This, with the hamlet lying behind unseen, 
is Swanston. 

The place in the dell is immediately connected 
with the city. Long ago, this sheltered field was 
purchased by the Edinburgh magistrates for the 
sake of the springs that rise or gather there. After 
they had built their water-house and laid their pipes, 



78 EDINBURGH 

it occurred to them that the place was suitable for 
junketing. Once entertained, with jovial magis- 
trates and public funds, the idea led speedily to 
accomplishment ; and Edinburgh could soon boast 
of a municipal Pleasure House. The dell was 
turned into a garden ; and on the knoll that shelters 
it from the plain and the sea-winds, they built a 
cottage looking to the hills. They brought crockets 
and gargoyles from old St. Giles's which they were 
then restoring, and disposed them on the gables and 
over the door and about the garden; and the 
quarry which had supplied them with building 
material, they draped with clematis and carpeted 
with beds of roses. So much for the pleasure of 
the eye ; for creature comfort, they made a capa- 
cious cellar in the hillside and fitted it with bins 
of the hewn stone. In process of time, the trees 
grew higher and gave shade to the cottage, and the 
evergreens sprang up and turned the dell into a 
thicket. There, purple magistrates relaxed them- 
selves from the pursuit of municipal ambition; 
cocked hats paraded soberly about the garden and 
in and out among the hollies ; authoritative canes 
drew ciphering upon the path ; and at night, from 
high upon the hills, a shepherd saw lighted win- 
dows through the foliage and heard the voice of 
city dignitaries raised in song. 

The farm is older. It was first a grange of 
Whitekirk Abbey, tilled and inhabited by rosy 
friars. Thence, after the Reformation, it passed 
into the hands of a true-blue Protestant family. 
During the Covenanting troubles, when o night 



EDINBURGH 79 

conventicle was held upon the Pentlands, the farm 
doors stood hospitably open till the morning-; the 
dresser was laden with cheese and bannocks, milk 
and brandy ; and the worshippers kept slipping 
down from the hill between two exercises, as 
couples visit the supper-room between two dances 
of a modern ball. In the Forty-five, some foraging 
Highlanders from Prince Charlie's army fell upon 
Swanston in the dawn. The great-grandfather of 
the late farmer was then a little child ; him they 
awakened by plucking the blankets from his bed, 
and he remembered, when he was an old man, their 
truculent looks and uncouth speech. The churn 
stood full of cream in the dairy, and with this they 
made their brose in high delight. " It was braw 
brose," said one of them. At last, they made off, 
laden like camels with their booty; and Swanston 
Farm has lain out of the way of history from that 
time forward. I do not know what may be yet in 
store for it. On dark days, when the mist runs 
low upon the hill, the house has a gloomy air as 
if suitable for private tragedy. But in hot July, 
you can fancy nothing more perfect than the 
garden, laid out in alleys and arbours and bright, 
old-fashioned flower-pots, and ending in a minia- 
ture ravine, all trellis-work and moss and tinkling 
waterfall, and housed from the sun under fathoms 
of broad foliage. 

The hamlet behind is one of the least consider- 
able of hamlets, and consists of a few cottages on 
a green beside a burn. Some of them (a strange 
thing in Scotland) are models of internal neatness; 



I 



8o EDINBURGH 

the beds adorned with patchwork, the shelves 
arrayed with willow-pattern plates, the floors and 
tables bright with scrubbing or pipeclay, and the 
very kettle polished like silver. It is the sign of a 
contented old age in country places, where there is 
little matter for gossip and no street sights. House- 
work becomes an art ; and at evening, when the 
cottage interior shines and twinkles in the glow of 
the fire, the housewife folds her hands and con- 
templates her finished picture; the snow and the 
wind may do their worst, she has made herself a 
pleasant corner in the world. The city might be a 
thousand miles away : and yet it was from close 
by that Mr. Bough painted the distant view of 
Edinburgh which has been engraved for this col- 
lection :^ and you have only to look at the cut, to see 
how near it is at hand. But hills and hill people 
are not easily sophisticated ; and if you walk out 
here on a summer Sunday, it is as like as not the 
shepherd may set his dogs upon you. But keep an 
unmoved countenance; they look formidable at 
the charge, but their hearts are in the right place; 
and they will only bark and sprawl about you on 
the grass, unmindful of their master's excitations. 

Kirk Yetton forms the north-eastern angle of 
the range ; thence, the Pentlands trend off to south 
and west. From the summit you look over a great 
expanse of champaign sloping to the sea and be- 
hold a large variety of distant hills. There are 
the hills of Fife, the hills of Peebles, the Lammer- 
moors and the Ochils, more or less mountainous 

1 Reference to an etchinsr in the original edition. 



EDINBURGH 8i 

in outline, more or less blue with distance. Of the 
Pentlands themselves, you see a field of wild lieath- 
ery peaks with a pond gleaming in the midst ; and 
to that side the view is as desolate as if you were 
looking into Galloway or Applecross. To turn to 
the other, is like a piece of travel. Far out in 
the lowlands Edinburgh shows herself, making a 
great smoke on clear days and spreading her sub- 
urbs about her for miles ; the Castle rises darkly 
in the midst ; and close by, Arthur's Seat makes a 
bold figure in the landscape. All around, cultivated 
fields, and woods, and smoking villages, and white 
country roads, diversify the uneven surface of the 
land. Trains crawl slowly abroad upon the rail- 
way lines; little ships are tacking in the Firth; 
the shadow of a mountainous cloud, as large as a 
parish, travels before the wind ; the wind itself 
ruffles the wood and standing corn, and sends 
pulses of varying colour across the landscape. So 
you sit, like Jupiter upon Olympus, and look down 
from afar upon men's life. The city is as silent as 
a city of the dead : from all its humming thorough- 
fares, not a voice, not a footfall, reaches you upon 
the hill. The sea-surf, the cries of ploughmen, the 
streams and the mill-wheels, the birds and the wind, 
keep up an animated concert through the plain; 
from farm to farm, dogs and crowing cocks con- 
tend together in defiance ; and yet from this Olym- 
pian station, except for the whispering rumour of 
a train, the world has fallen into a dead silence and 
the business of town and country grown voiceless 
in your ears. A crying hill-bird, the bleat of a sheep, 

6 



82 EDINBURGH 

a wind singing in the dry grass, seem not so much 
to interrupt, as to accompany, the stillness ; but to 
the spiritual ear, the whole scene makes a music at 
once human and rural, and discourses pleasant re- 
flections on the destiny of man. The spiry habitable 
city, ships, the divided fields, and browsing herds, 
and the straight highways, tell visibly of man's ac- 
tive and comfortable ways ; and you may be never 
so laggard and never so unimpressionable, but there 
is something in the view that spirits up your blood 
and puts you in the vein for cheerful labour. 

Immediately below is Fairmilehead, a spot of 
roof and a smoking chimney, where two roads, no 
thicker than packthread, intersect beside a hanging 
wood. If you are fanciful, you will be reminded 
of the ganger in the story. And the thought of 
this old exciseman, who once lipped and fingered 
on his pipe and uttered clear notes from it in the 
mountain air, and the words of the song he affected, 
carry your mind " Over the hills and far away " 
to distant countries ; and you have a vision of Edin- 
burgh not, as you see her, in the midst of a little 
neighbourhood, but as a boss upon the round world 
with all Europe and the deep sea for her surround- 
ings. For every place is a centre to the earth, 
whence highways radiate or ships set sail for foreign 
ports ; the limit of a parish is not more imaginary 
than the frontier of an empire ; and as a man sitting 
at home in his cabinet and swiftly writing books, 
so a city sends abroad an influence and a portrait 
of herself. There is no Edinburgh emigrant, far 
or near, from China to Peru, but he or she carries 



EDINBURGH 83 

some lively pictures of the mind, some sunset be- 
hind the Castle cliffs, some snow scene, some maze 
of city lamps, indelible in the memory and delight- 
ful to study in the intervals of toil. For any such, 
if this book fall in their way, here are a few more 
home pictures. It would be pleasant, if they should 
recognise a house where they had dwelt, or a walk 
that they had taken. 



II 

COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK 

(^A Fragment : 1871) 

VERY much as a painter half closes his eyes 
so that some salient unity may disengage 
itself from among the crowd of details, 
and what he sees may thus form itself into a whole; 
very much on the same principle, I may say, I allow 
a considerable lapse of time to intervene between 
any of my little journeyings and the attempt to 
chronicle them. I cannot describe a thing that is 
before me at the moment, or that has been before 
me only a very little while before; I must allow 
my recollections to get thoroughly strained free 
from all chaff till nothing be except the pure gold ; 
allow my memory to choose out what is truly 
memorable by a process of natural selection ; and I 
piously believe that in this way I ensure the Sur- 
vival of the Fittest. If I make notes for future 
use, or if I am obliged to write letters during the 
course of my little excursion, I so interfere with the 
process that I can never again find out what is 
worthy of being preserved, or what should be 
given in full length, what in torso, or what merely 
in profile. This process of incubation may be un- 



COCKERMOUTH 85 

reasonably prolonged; and I am somewhat afraid 
that I have made this mistake with the present 
journey. Like a bad daguerreotype, great part of 
it has been entirely lost ; I can tell you nothing 
about the beginning and nothing about the end ; 
but the doings of some fifty or sixty hours about the 
middle remain quite distinct and definite, like a 
little patch of sunshine on a long, shadowy plain, 
or the one spot on an old picture that has been re- 
stored by the dexterous hand of the cleaner. I re- 
member a tale of an old Scots minister, called upon 
suddenly to preach, who had hastily snatched an 
old sermon out of his study and found himself in 
the pulpit before he noticed that the rats had been 
making free with his manuscript and eaten the 
first two or three pages away ; he gravely explained 
to the congregation how he found himself situated ; 
" And now," said he, " let us just begin where 
the rats have left off." I must follow the divine's 
example, and take up the thread of my discourse 
where it first distinctly issues from the limbo of 
forget fulness. 

COCKERMOUTH 

I WAS lighting my pipe as I stepped out of the inn 
at Cockermouth, and did not raise my head until 
I was fairly in the street. When I did so, it flashed 
upon me that I was in England ; the evening 
sunlight lit up English houses, English faces, an 
English conformation of street, — as it were, an 
English atmosphere blew against my face. There 



86 COCKERMOUTH 

is nothing perhaps more puzzHng (if one thing in 
sociology can ever really be more unaccountable 
than another) than the great gulf that is set be- 
tween England and Scotland — a gulf so easy in 
appearance, in reality so difficult to traverse. Here 
are two people almost identical in blood ; pent up 
together on one small island, so that their inter- 
course (one would have thought) must be as close 
as that of prisoners who shared one cell of the Bas- 
tille; the same in language and religion; and yet 
a few years of quarrelsome isolation — a mere 
forenoon's tiff, as one may call it, in comparison 
with the great historical cycles — have so separated 
their thoughts and ways that not unions, not mutual 
dangers, nor steamers, nor railways, nor all the 
king's horses and all the king's men, seem able to 
obliterate the broad distinction. In the trituration 
of another century or so the corners may dis- 
appear; but in the meantime, in the year of grace 
1 87 1, I was as much in a new country as if I 
had been walking out of the Hotel St. Antoine 
at Antwerp. 

I felt a little thrill of pleasure at my heart as I 
realised the change, and strolled away up the street 
with my hands behind my back, noting in a dull, 
sensual way how foreign, and yet how friendly, 
were the slopes of the gables and the colour of 
the tiles, and even the demeanour and voices of the 
gossips round about me. 

Wandering in this aimless humour, I turned up 
a lane and found myself following the course of 
the bright little river. I passed first one and then 



AND KESWICK 87 

another, then a third, several couples out love- 
making in the spring evening; and a consequent 
feeling of loneliness was beginning to grow upon 
me, when I came to a dam across the river, and a 
mill — a great, gaunt promontory of building, — 
half on dry ground and half arched over the stream. 
The road here drew in its shoulders, and crept 
through between the landward extremity of the mill 
and a little garden enclosure, with a small house 
and a large sign-board within its privet hedge. I 
was pleased to fancy this an inn, and drew little 
etchings in fancy of a sanded parlour, and three- 
cornered spittoons, and a society of parochial gos- 
sips seated within over their churchwardens ; but 
as I drew near, the board displayed its superscrip- 
tion, and I could read the name of Smethurst, and 
the designation of " Canadian Felt Hat Manu- 
facturers." There was no more hope of evening 
fellowship, and I could only stroll on by the river- 
side, under the trees. The water was dappled with 
slanting sunshine, and dusted all over with a little 
mist of flying insects. There were some amorous 
ducks, also, whose love-making reminded me of 
what I had seen a little farther down. But the 
road grew sad, and I grew weary; and as I was 
perpetually haunted with the terror of a return of 
the tic that had been playing such ruin in my head 
a week ago, I turned and went back to the inn, and 
supper, and my bed. 

The next morning, at breakfast, I communicated 
to the smart waitress my intention of continuing 
down the coast and through Whitehaven to Fur- 



88 COCKERMOUTH 

ness, and, as I might have expected, I was instantly 
confronted by that last and most worrying form 
of interference, that chooses to introduce tradition 
and authority into the choice of a man's own pleas- 
ures. I can excuse a person combating my religious 
or philosophical heresies, because them I have 
deliberately accepted, and am ready to justify by 
present argument. But I do not seek to justify 
my pleasures. If I prefer tame scenery to grand, 
a little hot sunshine over lowland parks and wood- 
lands to the war of the elements round the summit 
of Mont Blanc ; or if I prefer a pipe of mild to- 
bacco, and the company of one or two chosen com- 
panions, to a ball where I feel myself very hot, 
awkward, and weary, I merely state these prefer- 
ences as facts, and do not seek to establish them 
as principles. This is not the general rule, how- 
ever, and accordingly the waitress was shocked, as 
one might be at a heresy, to hear the route that I 
had sketched out for myself. Everybody who came 
to Cockermouth for pleasure, it appeared, went on 
to Keswick. It was in vain that I put up a little 
plea for the liberty of the subject ; it w^as in vain 
that I said I should prefer to go to Whitehaven. 
I was told that there was " nothing to see there " 
— that weary, hackneyed, old falsehood ; and at 
last, as the handmaiden began to look really con- 
cerned, I gave way, as men always do in such 
circumstances, and agreed that I was to leave for 
Kesw^ick by a train in the early evening. 



AND KESWICK 89 



AN EVANGELIST 

CocKERMOUTH itself, Oil the same authority, was 
a place with " nothing to see " ; nevertheless I saw 
a good deal, and retain a pleasant, vague picture of 
the town and all its surroundings. I might have 
dodged happily enough all day about the main street 
and up to the Castle and in and out of by-ways, 
but the curious attraction that leads a person in a 
strange place to follow, day after day, the same 
round, and to make set habits for himself in a 
week or ten days, led me half unconsciously up the 
same road that I had gone the evening before. 
When I came up to the hat manufactory, Smethurst 
himself was standing in the garden gate. He was 
brushing one Canadian felt hat, and several others 
had been put to await their turn one above the 
other on his own head, so that he looked some- 
thing like the typical Jew old-clothesman. As I 
drew near, he came sidling out of the doorway to 
accost me, with so curious an expression on his face 
that I instinctively prepared myself to apologise for 
some unwitting trespass. His first question rather 
confirmed me in this belief, for it was whether or 
not he had seen me going up this way last night ; 
and after having answered in the affirmative, I 
waited in some alarm for the rest of my indictment. 
But the good man's heart was full of peace; and 
he stood there brushing his hats and prattling on 
about fishing, and walking, and the pleasures of 
convalescence, in a bright shallow stream that kept 



90 COCKERMOUTH 

me pleased and interested, I could scarcely say how. 
As he went on, he warmed to his subject, and 
laid his hats aside to go along the water-side 
and show me where the large trout commonly lay, 
underneath an overhanging bank ; and he was much 
disappointed, for my sake, that there were none 
visible just then. Then he wandered off on to 
another tack, and stood a great while out in the 
middle of a meadow in the hot sunshine, trying to 
make out that he had known me before, or, if not 
me. some friend of mine, merely, I believe, out of a 
desire that we should feel more friendly and at our 
ease with one another. At last he made a little 
speech to me, of which I wish I could recollect the 
very words, for they were so simple and unaffected 
that they put all the best writing and speaking to 
the blush ; as it is, I can recall only the sense, and 
that perhaps imperfectly. He began by saying that 
he had little things in his past life that it gave him 
especial pleasure to recall ; and that the faculty of 
receiving such sharp impressions had now died out 
in himself, but must at my age be still quite lively 
and active. Then he told me that he had a little 
raft afloat on the river above the dam which he 
was going to lend me, in order that I might be 
able to look back, in after years, upon having done 
so, and get great pleasure from the recollection. 
Now, I have a friend of my own who will forego 
present enjoyments and suffer much present in- 
convenience for the sake of manufacturing " a 
reminiscence " for himself ; but there was something 
singularly refined in this pleasure that the hat-maker 



AND KESWICK 91 

found in making reminiscences for others ; surely 
no more simple or unselfish luxury can be imagined. 
After he had unmoored his little embarkation, and 
seen me safely shoved off into mid-stream, he ran 
away back to his hats with the air of a man who 
had only just recollected that he had anything 
to do. 

I did not stay very long on the raft. It ought 
to have been very nice punting about there in the 
cool shade of the trees, or sitting moored to an 
overhanging root ; but perhaps the very notion that 
I was bound in gratitude specially to enjoy my 
little cruise, and cherish its recollection, turned the 
whole thing from a pleasure into a duty. Be that 
as it may, there is no doubt that I soon wearied and 
came ashore again, and that it gives me more pleas- 
ure to recall the man himself, and his simple, happy 
conversation, so full of gusto and sympathy, than 
anything possibly connected with his crank, inse- 
cure embarkation. In order to avoid seeing him, 
for I was not a little ashamed of myself for having 
failed to enjoy his treat sufficiently, I determined 
to continue up the river, and, at all prices, to find 
some other way back into the town in time for 
dinner. As I went, I was thinking of Smethurst 
with admiration ; a look into that man's mind was 
like a retrospect over the smiling champaign of his 
past life, and very different from the Sinai-gorges 
up which one looks for a terrified moment into the 
dark souls of many good, many wise, and many 
prudent men. I cannot be very grateful to such 
men for their excellence, and wisdom, and prudence. 



92 COCKER MOUTH 

I find myself facing as stoutly as I can a hard, 
combative existence, full of doubt, difficulties, de- 
feats, disappointments, and dangers, quite a hard 
enough life without their dark countenances at 
my elbow, so that what I want is a happy-minded 
Smethurst placed here and there at ugly corners 
of my life's wayside, preaching his gospel of quiet 
and contentment. 

ANOTHER 

I WAS shortly to meet with an evangelist of an- 
other stamp. After I had forced my way through 
a gentleman's grounds, I came out on the highroad, 
and sat down to rest myself on a heap of stones at 
the top of a long hill, with Cockermouth lying 
snugly at the bottom. An Irish beggar-woman, 
with a beautiful little girl by her side, came up to 
ask for alms, and gradually fell to telling me the 
little tragedy of her life. Her own sister, she told 
me, had seduced her husband from her after many 
years of married life, and the pair had fled, leaving 
her destitute, with the little girl upon her hands. 
She seemed quite hopeful and cheery, and, though 
she was unaffectedly sorry for the loss of her hus- 
band's earnings, she made no pretence of despair 
at the loss of his affection; some day she would 
meet the fugitives, and the law would see her duly 
righted, and in the meantime the smallest contribu- 
tion was gratefully received. While she was tell- 
ing all this in the most matter-of-fact way, I had 
been noticing the approach of a tall man, with a 



AND KESWICK 93 

high white hat and darkish clothes. He came up 
the hill at a rapid pace, and joined our little group 
with a sort of half-salutation. Turning at once 
to the woman, he asked her in a business-like way 
whether she had anything to do, whether she were 
a Catholic or a Protestant, whether she could read, 
and so forth ; and then, after a few kind words 
and some sweeties to the child, he despatched the 
mother with some tracts about Biddy and the Priest, 
and the Orangeman's Bible. I was a little amused 
at his abrupt manner, for he was still a young man, 
and had somewhat the air of a navy officer; but 
he tackled me with great solemnity. I could make 
fun of what he said, for I do not think it was very 
wise; but the subject does not appear to me just 
now in a jesting light, so I shall only say that he 
related to me his own conversion, which had been 
effected (as is very often the case) through the 
agency of a gig accident, and that, after having 
examined me and diagnosed my case, he selected 
some suitable tracts from his repertory, gave them 
to me, and, bidding me God-speed, went on his 
way. 

LAST OF SMETHURST 

That evening I got into a third-class carriage 
on my way for Keswick, and was followed almost 
immediately by a burly man in brown clothes. 
This fellow-passenger was seemingly ill at ease, 
and kept continually putting his head out of the 
window, and asking the bystanders if they saw 



94 COCKERMOUTH 

him coming. At last, when the train was already 
in motion, there was a commotion on the plat- 
form, and a way was left clear to our carriage door. 
He had arrived. In the hurry I could just see 
Smethurst, red and panting, thrust a couple of clay 
pipes into my companion's outstretched hand, and 
hear him crying his farewells after us as we slipped 
out of the station at an ever-accelerating pace. I 
said something about its being a close run, and the 
broad man, already engaged in filling one of the 
pipes, assented, and went on to tell me of his own 
stupidity in forgetting a necessary, and of how his 
friend had good-naturedly gone down-towp at the 
last moment to supply the omission. I mentioned 
that I had seen Mr. Smethurst already, and that he 
had been very polite to me ; and we fell into a 
discussion of the hatter's merits that lasted some 
time and left us quite good friends at its conclu- 
sion. The topic was productive of good-will. We 
exchanged tobacco and talked about the season, 
and agreed at last that we should go to the same 
hotel at Keswick and sup in company. As he had 
some business in the town which would occupy 
him some hour or so, on our arrival I was to im- 
prove the time and go down to the lake, that I 
might see a glimpse of the promised wonders. 

The night had fallen already when I reached the 
water-side, at a place where many pleasure-boats 
are moored and ready for hire; and as I went 
along a stony path, between wood and water, a 
strong wind blew in gusts from the far end of the 
lake. The sky was covered with flying scud ; and, 



AND KESWICK 95 

as this was ragged, there was quite a wild chase of 
shadow and moon-ghmpse over the surface of the 
shuddering water. I had to hold my hat on, and 
was growing rather tired, and inclined to go back 
in disgust, when a little incident occurred to break 
the tedium. A sudden and violent squall of wind 
sundered the low underwood, and at the same time 
there came one of those brief discharges of moon- 
light, which leaped into the opening thus made, and 
showed me three girls in the prettiest flutter and 
disorder. It was as though they had sprung out of 
the ground. I accosted them very politely in my 
capacity of stranger, and requested to be told the 
names of all manner of hills and woods and places 
that I did not wish to know, and we stood together 
for awhile and had an amusing little talk. The 
wind, too. made himself of the party, brought the 
colour into their faces, and gave them enough to 
do to repress their drapery ; and one of them, amid 
much giggling, had to pirouette round and round 
upon her toes (as girls do) when some specially 
:Strong gust had got the advantage over her. They 
were just high enough up in the social order not 
to be afraid to speak to a gentleman ; and just low 
;enough to feel a little tremor, a nervous conscious- 
ness of wrong-doing — of stolen waters, that gave 
a considerable zest to our most innocent interview. 
They were as much discomposed and fluttered, in- 
deed, as if I had been a wicked baron proposing 
to elope with the whole trio ; but they showed no 
inclination to go away, and I had managed to get 
them ofif hills and waterfalls and on to more prom- 



96 COCKERMOUTH 

ising subjects, when a young man was descried 
coming along the path from the direction of Kes- 
wick. Now whether he was the young- man of one 
of my friends, or the brother of one of them, or 
indeed the brother of all, I do not know ; but they 
incontinently said that they must be going, and 
went away up the path with friendly salutations. I 
need not say that I found the lake and the moon- 
light rather dull after their departure, and speedily 
found my way back to potted herrings and whisky- 
and-water in the commercial room with my late 
fellow-traveller. In the smoking-room there was 
a tall dark man with a moustache, in an ulster coat, 
who had got the best place and was monopolising 
most of the talk ; and, as I came in, a whisper came 
round to me from both sides, that this was the 
manager of a London theatre. The presence of 
such a man was a great event for Keswick, and I 
must own that the manager showed himself equal 
to his position. He had a large fat pocket-book, 
from which he produced poem after poem, written 
on the backs of letters or hotel-bills ; and nothing 
could be more humourous than his recitation of 
these elegant extracts, except perhaps the anecdotes 
with which he varied the entertainment. Seeing, I 
suppose, something less countrified in my appear- 
ance than in most of the company, he singled me 
out to corroborate some statements as to the de- 
pravity and vice of the aristocracy, and when he 
went on to describe some gilded saloon experiences, 
I am proud to say that he honoured my sagacity 
with one little covert wink before a second time 



AND KESWICK 97 

appealing to me for confirmation. The wink was 
not thrown away; I went in up to the elbows with 
the manager, until I think that some of the glory of 
that great man settled by reflection upon me, and 
that I was as noticeably the second person in the 
smoking-room as he was the first. For a young 
man, this was a position of some distinction. I think 
you will admit. . . . 



Ill 

ROADS 

(1873) 

NO amateur will deny that he can find more 
pleasure in a single drawing, over which 
he can sit a whole quiet forenoon, and 
so gradually study himself into humour with the 
artist, than he can ever extract from the dazzle 
and accumulation of incongruous impressions that 
sends him, weary and stupefied, out of some famous 
picture-gallery. But what is thus admitted with 
regard to art is not extended to the (so-called) 
natural beauties : no amount of excess in sublime 
mountain outline or the graces of cultivated low- 
land can do anything, it is supposed, to weaken or 
degrade the palate. We are not at all sure, how- 
ever, that moderation, and a regimen tolerably 
austere, even in scenery, are not healthful and 
strengthening to the taste ; and that the best school 
for a lover of nature is not to be found in one of 
those countries where there is no stage effect — 
nothing salient or sudden, — but a quiet spirit of 
orderly and harmonious beauty pervades all the 
details, so that we can patiently attend to each of 
the little touches that strike in us, all of them 



ROADS 99 

together, the subdued note of the landscape. It is 
in scenery such as this that we find ourselves in 
the rigiit temper to seek out small sequestered love- 
liness. The constant recurrence of similar com- 
binations of colour and outline gradually forces 
upon us a sense of how the harmony has been built 
up, and we become familiar with something of 
nature's mannerism. This is the true pleasure of 
your "rural voluptuary," — not to remain awe- 
stricken before a Mount Chimborazo ; not to sit 
deafened over the big drum in the orchestra, but day 
by day to teach himself some new beauty — to 
experience some new vague and tranquil sensation 
that has before evaded him. It is not the people 
who " have pined and hungered after nature many 
a year, in the great city pent," as Coleridge said, 
in the poem that made Charles Lamb so much 
ashamed of himself; it is not those who make tlie 
greatest progress in this intimacy with her, or who 
are most quick to see and have the greatest gusto 
to enjoy. In this, as in everything else, it is minute 
knowledge and long-continued loving industry that 
make the true dilettante. A man must have 
thought much over scenery before he begins fully 
to enjoy it. It is no youngling enthusiasm on hill- 
tops that can possess itself of the last essence of 
beauty. Probably most people's heads are growl- 
ing bare before they can see all in a landscape 
that they have the capability of seeing; and, even 
then, it will be only for one little moment of con- 
summation before the faculties are again on the 
decline, and they that look out of the windows 



loo ROADS 

begin to be darkened and restrained in sight. Thus 
the study of nature should be carried forward 
thoroughly and with system. Every gratification 
should be rolled long under the tongue, and we 
should be always eager to analyse and compare, 
in order that we may be able to give some plausible 
reason for our admirations. True, it is difficult 
to put even approximately into words the kind of 
feelings thus called into play. There is a dangerous 
vice inherent in any such intellectual refining upon 
vague sensation. The analysis of such satisfactions 
lends itself very readily to literary affectations; 
and we can all think of instances where it has 
shown itself apt to exercise a morbid influence, 
even upon an author's choice of language and the 
.turn of his sentences. And yet there is much that 
makes the attempt attractive ; for any expression, 
however imperfect, once given to a cherished feel- 
ing, seems a sort of legitimation of the pleasure 
we take in it. A common sentiment is one of those 
great goods that make life palatable and ever new. 
The knowledge that another has felt as we have 
felt, and seen things, even if they are little things, 
not much otherwise than we have seen them, will 
continue to the end to be one of life's choicest 
pleasures. 

Let the reader, then, betake himself in the spirit 
we have recommended to some of the quieter kinds 
of English landscape. In those homely and placid 
agricultural districts, familiarity will bring into 
relief many things worthy of notice, and urge them 
pleasantly home to him by a sort of loving repe- 



ROADS loi 

tition ; such as the wonderful life-giving speed of 
windmill sails above the stationary country ; the 
occurrence and recurrence of the same church 
tower at the end of one long vista after another ; 
and, conspicuous among these sources of cjuiet 
pleasure, the character and variety of the road 
itself, along which he takes his way. Not only near 
at hand, in the lithe contortions with which it 
adapts itself to the interchanges of level and slope, 
but far away also, when he sees a few hundred feet 
of it upheaved against a hill and shining in the 
afternoon sun, he will find it an object so change- 
ful and enlivening that he can always pleasurably 
busy his mind about it. He may leave the river-side, 
or fall out of the way of villages, but the road he 
has always with him ; and, in the true humour of 
observation, will find in that sufficient company. 
From its subtle windings and changes of level there 
arises a keen and continuous interest, that keeps the 
attention e^'er alert and cheerful. Every sensitive 
adjustment to the contour of the ground, every 
little dip and swerve, seems instinct with life and 
an exquisite sense of balance and beauty. The 
road rolls upon the easy slopes of the country, like 
a long ship in the hollows of the sea. The very 
margins of waste ground, as they trench a little 
farther on the beaten way. or recede again to the 
shelter of the hedge, have something of the same 
free delicacy of line — of the same swing and wil- 
fulness. You might think for a whole summer's 
day (and not have thought it any nearer an end by 
evening) what concourse and succession of circum- 



I02 ROADS 

stances has produced the least of these deflections; 
and it is, perhaps, just in this that we should look 
for the secret of their interest. A foot-path across 
a meadow — in all its human waywardness and 
unaccountability, in all the grata protervitas of its 
varying direction — will always be more to us 
than a railroad well engineered through a dithcult 
country/ No reasoned sequence is thrust upon 
our attention : we seem to have slipped for one 
lawless little moment out of the iron rule of cause 
and effect ; and so we revert at once to some of 
the pleasant old heresies of personification, always 
poetically orthodox, and attribute a sort of free- 
will, an active and spontaneous life, to the white 
riband of road that lengthens out, and bends, and 
cunningly adapts itself to the inequalities of the 
land before our eyes. We remember, as we write, 
some miles of fine wide highway laid out with 
conscious aesthetic artifice through a broken and 
richly cultivated tract of country. It is said that 
the engineer had Hogarth's line of beauty in his 
mind as he laid them down. And the result is 
striking. One splendid satisfying sweep passes 
with easy- transition into another, and there is 
nothing to trouble or dislocate the strong continu- 
ousness of the main line of the road. And yet there 
is something wanting. There is here no saving 
imperfection, none of those secondary curves and 
little trepidations of direction that carry, in natural 

1 Coni]5are Blake, in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell : " Im- 
provement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads, without 
improvement, are roads of Genius." 



ROADS 103 

•roads, our curiosity actively along with them. One 
feels at once that this road has not grown like 
a natural road, but has been laboriously made to 
pattern ; and that, while a model may be academi- 
cally correct in outline, it will always be inanimate 
and cold. The traveller is also aware of a sym- 
pathy of mood between himself and the road he 
travels. We have all seen ways that have wandered 
into heavy sand near the sea-coast, and trail wearily 
over the dunes like a trodden serpent : here we too 
must plod forward at a dull, laborious pace; and 
so a sympathy is preserved between our frame of 
mind and the expression of the relaxed, heavy 
curves of the roadway. Such a phenomenon, in- 
deed, our reason might perhaps resolve with a 
little trouble. We might reflect that the present 
road had been developed out of a track sponta- 
neously followed by generations of primitive way- 
farers ; and might see in its expression a testimony 
that those generations had been affected at the same 
ground, one after another, in the same manner as 
we are affected to-day. Or we might carry the re- 
flection further, and remind ourselves that where 
the air is invigorating and the ground firm under 
the traveller's foot, his eye is quick to take advan- 
tage of small undulations, and he will turn carelessly 
aside from the direct way wherever there is any- 
thing beautiful to examine or some promise of a 
wider view ; so that even a bush of wild roses may 
permanently bias and deform the straight path over 
the meadow ; whereas, where the soil is heavy, one 
is preoccupied with the labour of mere progression, 



I04 ROADS 

and goes with a bowed head heavily and nnobser- 
vantly forward. Reason, however, will not carry 
us the whole way ; for the sentiment often recurs 
in situations where it is very hard to imagine 
any possible explanation ; and indeed, if we drive 
briskly along a good, well-made road in an open 
vehicle, we shall experience this sympathy almost 
at its fullest. We feel the sharp settle of the 
springs at some curiously twisted corner ; after a 
steep ascent, the fresh air dances in our faces as 
we rattle precipitately down the other side, and we 
find it difficult to avoid attributing something head- 
long, a sort of abandon, to the road itself. 

The mere winding of the path is enough to 
enliven a long day's walk in even a commonplace, 
or dreary country-side. Something that we have 
seen from miles back, upon an eminence, is so 
long hid from us, as we wander through folded 
valleys or among woods, that our expectation of 
seeing it again is sharpened into a violent appe- 
tite, and as we draw nearer we impatiently quicken 
our steps and turn every corner with a beating 
heart. It is through these prolongations of ex- 
pectancy, this succession of one hope to another, 
that we live out long seasons of pleasure in a few 
hours' walk. It is in following these capricious 
sinuosities that we learn, only bit by bit and 
through one coquettish reticence after another, 
much as we learn the heart of a friend, the whole 
loveliness of the country. This disposition always 
preserves something new to be seen, and takes 
us, like a careful cicerone, to many different points 



ROADS 105 

of distant view before it allows lis finally to ap- 
proach the hoped-for destination. 

In its connection with the traffic, and whole 
friendly intercourse with the country, there is 
something very pleasant in that succession of 
saunterers and brisk and business-like passers-by, 
that peoples our ways and helps to build up what 
Walt Whitman calls " the cheerful voice of the 
public road, the gay, fresh sentiment of the road." 
But out of the great network of ways that binds 
all life together from the hill-farm to the city, 
there is something individual to most, and, on the 
whole, nearly as much choice on the score of com- 
pany as on the score of beauty or easy travel. On 
some we are never long without the sound of 
wheels, and folk pass us by so thickly that we lose 
the sense of their number. But on others, about 
little-frequented districts, a meeting is an affair of 
moment ; we have the sight far off of some one 
coming towards us, the growing definiteness of the 
person, and then the brief passage and salutation, 
and the road left empty in front of us for perhaps a 
great while to come. Such encounters have a wist- 
ful interest that can hardly be understood by the 
dweller in places more populous. We remember 
standing beside a countryman once, in the mouth 
of a quiet by-street in a city that was more 
than ordinarily crowded and bustling; he seemed 
stunned and bewildered by the continual passage 
of different faces ; and after a long pause, during 
which he appeared to search for some suitable ex- 
pression, he said timidly that there seemed to be a 



io6 ROADS 

great deal of meeting thereabouts. The phrase is 
significant. It is the expression of town-hfe in the 
language of the long, solitary country highways. 
A meeting of one with one was what this man had 
been used to in the pastoral uplands from which 
he came; and the concourse of the streets was in 
his eyes only an extraordinary multiplication of 
such " meetings." 

And now we come to that last and most subtle 
quality of all, to that sense of prospect, of outlook, 
that is brought so powerfully to our minds by a 
road. In real nature as well as in old landscapes, 
beneath that impartial daylight in wdiich a wdiole 
variegated plain is plunged and saturated, the line 
of the road leads the eye forth with the vague sense 
of desire up to the green limit of the horizon. 
Travel is brought home to us, and we visit in 
spirit every grove and hamlet that tempts us in 
the distance. SeJinsncht — the passion for what is 
ever beyond — is livingly expressed in that white 
riband of possible travel that severs the uneven 
country; not a ploughman following his plough 
up the shining furrow\ not the blue smoke of any 
cottage in a hollow, but is brought to us with a 
sense of nearness and attainability by this wa- 
vering line of junction. There is a passionate 
paragraph in IVerther that strikes the very key. 
" When I came hither," he writes, " how the beauti- 
ful valley invited me on every side, as I gazed down 
into it from the hilltop ! There the wood — ah, 
that I might mingle in its shadows ! there the 
mountain summits — ah, that I might look down 



ROADS 107 

from them over the broad country ! tlie interhnked 
hills! the secret valleys! O, to lose myself among 
their mysteries ! I hurried into the midst, and came 
back without finding aug'ht I hoped for. Alas! 
the distance is like the future. A vast whole lies 
in the twilight before our spirit; sight and feeling 
alike plunge and lose themselves in the prospect, 
and we yearn to surrender our whole being, and 
let it be filled full with all the rapture of one single 
glorious sensation ; and alas ! when we hasten to 
the fruition, when there is changed to here, all is 
afterwards as it was ])efore, and w^e stand in our 
indigent and cramped estate, and our soul thirsts 
after a still ebbing elixir." It is to this wandering 
and aneasy spirit of anticipation that roads min- 
ister. Every little vista, every little glimpse that 
we have of what lies before us, gives the impatient 
imagination rein, so that it can outstrip the body 
and already plunge into the shadow of the woods, 
and overlook from the hilltop the plain beyond 
it, and wander in the windings of the valleys that 
are still far in front. The road is already there 
— we shall not be long behind. It is as if we were 
marching with the rear of a great army, and, from 
far before, heard the acclamation of the people as 
the vanguard entered some friendly and jubilant 
city. Would not e^'ery man. through all the long 
miles of march, feel as if he also were wdthin the 
gates ? 



IV 

ON THE ENJOYMENT OF 
UNPLEASANT PLACES 

(1874) 

IT is a difficult matter to make the most of any 
given place, and we have much in our own 
power. Things looked at patiently from one 
side after another generally end by showing a side 
that is beautiful. A few months ago some words 
were said in the Portfolio as to an " austere regi- 
men in scenery"; and such a discipline was then 
recommended as " healthful and strengthening to 
the taste." That is the text, so to speak, of the 
present essay. This discipline in scenery, it must 
be understood, is something more than a mere walk 
before breakfast to whet the appetite. For when 
we are put down in some unsightly neighbourhood, 
and especially if we have come to be more or less 
dependent on what we see, we must set ourselves 
to hunt out beautiful things with all the ardour and 
patience of a botanist after a rare plant. Day by 
clay we perfect ourselves in the art of seeing Nature 
more favourably. We learn to live with her, as 
people learn to live with fretful or violent spouses : 



UNPLEASANT PLACES 109 

to dwell lovingly on what is good, and shut our 
eyes against all that is bleak or inharmonious. We 
learn, also, to come to each place in the right spirit. 
The traveller, as Brantome cjuaintly tells us, " fait 
dcs discours en soi pour se soutciiir en chemin " ; 
and into these discourses he weaves something out 
of all that he sees and suffers by the way ; they take 
their tone greatly from the varying character of 
the scene; a sharp ascent brings different thoughts 
from a level road ; and the man's fancies grow 
lighter as he comes out of the wood into a clearing. 
Nor does the scenery any more affect the thoughts 
than the thoughts aft'ect the scenery. We see places 
through our humours as through differently col- 
oured glasses. We are ourselves a term in the 
e(|uation, a note of the chord, and make discord 
or harmony almost at will. There is no fear for 
the result, if we can but surrender ourselves suffi- 
ciently to the country that surrounds and follows 
us, so that we are ever thinking suitable thoughts 
or telling ourselves some suitable sort of story as 
we go. We become thus, in some sense, a centre 
of beauty; we are provocative of beauty, much as 
a gentle and sincere character is provocative of 
sincerity and gentleness in others. And even where 
there is no harmony to be elicited by the quickest 
and most obedient of spirits, we may still embellish 
a place with some attraction of romance. We may 
learn to go far afield for associations, and handle 
them lightly when we have found them. Some- 
times an old print comes to our aid; I have seen 
many a spot lit up at once with picturesque imagi- 



no ON THE ENJOYMENT 

nations, by a reminiscence of Callot, or Sadeler, or 
Paul Brill. Dick Tnrpin has been my lay figure 
for many an English lane. And I suppose the 
Trossachs would hardly be the Trossachs for most 
tourists if a man of admirable romantic instinct 
had not peopled it for them with harmonious fig- 
ures, and brought them thither with minds rightly 
prepared for the impression. There is half the 
battle in this preparation. For instance : I have 
rarely been able to visit, in the proper spirit, the j 
wild and inhospitable places of our own Highlands, i 
I am happier where it is tame and fertile, and not j 
readily pleased without trees. I understand that i 
there are some phases of mental trouble that bar- i 
monise well with such surroundings, and that some j 
persons, by the dispensing power of the imagina- ! 
tion, can go back several centuries in spirit, and ! 
put themselves into sympathy with the hunted, | 
houseless, unsociable way of life that was in its 1 
place upon these savage hills. Now, when I am 
sad, I like nature to charm me out of my sadness, 
like David before Saul ; and the thought of these 
past ages strikes nothing in me but an unpleasant 
pity ; so that I can never hit on the right humour 
for this sort of landscape, and lose much pleasure 
in consequence. Still, even here, if I were only let 
alone, and time enough were given, I should have 
all n:ianner of pleasures, and take many clear and 
beautiful images away with me when I left. When 
we cannot think oursehxs into sympathy with the 
great features of a country, we learn to ignore 
them, and put our head among the grass for flowers, 



OF UNPLEASANT PLACES iii 

or pore, for long times together, over the changeful 
current of a stream. We come down to the sermon 
in stones, when we are shut out from any poem in 
the spread landscape. We begin to peep and bot- 
anise, we take an interest in birds and insects, we 
find many things beautiful in miniature. The 
reader will recollect the little summer scene in 
JVuthcring HcigJifs — the one warm scene, per- 
haps, in all that powerful, miserable novel — 
and the great feature that is made therein by 
grasses and flowers and a little sunshine : this 
is in the spirit of which I now speak. And, 
lastly, we can go indoors ; interiors are some- 
times as beautiful, often more picturesque, than 
the shows of the open air, and they have that 
quality of shelter of which I shall presently have 
more to say. 

With all this in mind, I have often been tempted 
to put forth the paradox that any place is good 
enough to live a life in, while it is only in a few, 
and those highly favoured, that we can pass a few 
hours agreeably. For, if we only stay long enough, 
we become at home in the neighbourhood. Remi- 
niscences spring up, like flowers, about uninterest- 
ing corners.. We forget to some degree the superior 
loveliness of other places, and fall into a tolerant 
and sympathetic spirit which is its own reward and 
justification. Looking back the other day on some 
recollections of my own, I w^as astonished to find 
how much I owed to such a residence; six weeks 
in one unpleasant country-side had done more, it 
seemed, to cjuicken and educate my sensibilities 



112 ON THE ENJOYMENT 

than many years in places that jumped more nearly 
with my inclination. 

The country to which I refer was a level and 
treeless plateau, over which the winds cut like a 
wdiip. For miles on miles it was the same. A 
river, indeed, fell into the sea near the town where 
I resided ; but the valley of the river was shallow 
and bald, for as far up as ever I had the heart to 
follow it. There were roads, certainly, but roads 
that had no beauty or interest ; for, as there was no 
timber, and but little irregularity of surface, you 
saw your whole walk exposed to you from the 
beginning: there was nothing left to fancy, noth- 
ing to expect, nothing to see by the wayside, save 
here and there an unhomely-looking homestead, 
and here and there a solitary, spectacled stone- 
breaker ; and you were only accompanied, as you 
went doggedly forward, by the gaunt telegraph- 
posts and the hum of the resonant wires in the 
keen sea-wind. To one who had learned to know 
their song in warm pleasant places by the Medi- 
terranean, it seemed to taunt the country, and make 
it still bleaker by suggested contrast. Even the 
waste places by the side of the road were not, as 
Hawthorne liked to put it, " taken back tQ Nature " 
by any decent covering of vegetation. Wherever 
the land had the chance, it seemed to lie fallow. 
There is a certain tawny nudity of the South, 
bare sunburnt plains, coloured like a lion, and 
hills clothed only in the blue transparent air; 
but this was of another description — this was 
the nakedness of the North ; the earth seemed to 



OF UNPLEASANT PLACES 113 

know that it was naked, and was ashamed and 
cold. 

It seemed to be always blowing on that coast. 
Indeed, this had passed into the speech of the in- 
habitants, and they saluted each other when they 
met with " Breezy, breezy," instead of the cus- 
tomary " Fine day " of farther south. These con- 
tinual winds were not like the harvest breeze, that 
just keeps an equable pressure against your face as 
you walk, and serves to set all the trees talking 
over your head, or bring round you the smell of 
the wet surface of the country after a shower. 
They were of the bitter, hard, persistent sort, that 
interferes with sight and respiration, and makes 
the eyes sore. Even such winds as these have their 
own merit in proper time and place. It is pleasant 
to see them brandish great masses of shadow. And 
what a power they have over the colour of the 
world ! How they ruffle the solid woodlands in 
their passage, and make them shudder and whiten 
like a single willow ! There is nothing more ver- 
tiginous than a wind like this among the woods, 
with all its sights and noises ; and the effect gets 
between some painters and their sober eyesight, 
so that, even when the rest of their picture is calm, 
the foliage is coloured like foliage in a gale. There 
was nothing, however, of this sort to be noticed 
in a country where there were no trees and hardly 
any shadows, save the passive shadows of clouds 
or those of rigid houses and walls. But the wind 
was nevertheless an occasion of pleasure ; for no- 
where could you taste more fully the pleasure of 



114 ON THE ENJOYMENT 

a sudden lull, or a place of opportune shelter. The 
reader knows what I mean ; he must remember 
how, when he has sat himself down behind a dyke 
on a hillside, he delighted to hear the wind hiss 
vainly through the crannies at his back; how his 
body tingled all over with warmth, and it began to 
dawn upon him, with a sort of slow surprise, that 
the country was beautiful, the heather purple, and 
the far-away hills all marbled with sun and shadow. 
Wordsworth, in a beautiful passage of the " Pre- 
lude," has used this as a figure for the feeling 
struck in us by the quiet by-streets of London after 
the uproar of the great thoroughfares; and the 
comparison may be turned the other way with as 
good effect: 

"Meanwhile the roar continues, till at length, 
Escaped as from an enemy, we turn 
Abruptly into some sequester'd nook, 
Still as a shelter'd place when winds blow loud ! " 

I remember meeting a man once, in a train, who 
told me of what must have been quite the most 
perfect instance of this pleasure of escape. He 
had gone up, one sunny, windy morning, to the 
top of a great cathedral somewhere abroad ; I think 
it was Cologne Cathedral, the great unfinished 
marvel by the Rhine; and after a long while in 
dark stairways, he issued at last into the sunshine, 
on a platform high above the town. At that eleva- 
tion it was quite still and warm ; the gale was only 
in the lower strata of the air, and he had forgotten 
it in the quiet interior of the church and during his 



OF UNPLEASANT PLACES 115 

long ascent ; and so yoii may judge of his surprise 
when, resting his arms on tlie sunht balustrade and 
looking over into the Place far below him, he saw 
the good people holding on their hats and leaning 
hard against the wind as they walked. There is 
something, to my fancy, quite perfect in this little 
experience of my fellow-traveller's. The ways of 
men seem always very trivial to us when we find 
ourselves alone on a church-top, with the blue sky 
and a few tall pinnacles, and see far below us the 
steep roofs and foreshortened buttresses, and the 
silent activity of the city streets ; but how much 
more must they not have seemed so to him as he 
stood, not only above other men's business, but 
above other men's climate, in a golden zone like 
Apollo's ! • 

This was the sort of pleasure I found in the 
country of which I write. The pleasure was to 
be out of the wind, and to keep it in memory all 
the time, and hug oneself upon the shelter. And 
it was only by the sea that any such sheltered places 
were to be found. Between the black worm-eaten 
headlands there are little bights and havens, well 
screened from the wind and the commotion of the 
external sea, where the sand and weeds look up 
into the gazer's face from a depth of tranquil 
water, and the sea-birds, screaming and flickering 
from the ruined crags, alone disturb the silence 
and the sunshine. One such place has impressed 
itself on my memory beyond all others. On a 
rock by the water's edge, old fighting men of the 
Norse breed had planted a double castle ; the two 



b. 



ii6 ON THE ENJOYMENT 

stood wall to wall like semi-detached villas ; and 
yet feud had run so high between their owners, 
that one, from out of a window, shot the other as 
he stood in his own doorway. There is something 
in the juxtaposition of these two enemies full of 
tragic irony. It is grim to think of bearded men 
and bitter women taking hateful counsel together 
about the two hall-fires at night, when the sea 
boomed against the foundations and the wild 
winter wind was loose over the battlements. And 
in the study we may reconstruct for ourselves some 
pale figure of what life then was. Not so when 
we are there ; when we are there such thoughts 
come to us only to intensify a contrary impression, 
and association is turned against itself. I remem- 
ber walking thither three afternoons in succession, 
my eyes weary with being set against the wind, 
and how, dropping suddenly over the edge of the 
down, I found myself in a new world of warmth 
and shelter. The wind, from which I had escaped, 
" as from an enemy," was seemingly quite local. 
It carried no clouds with it, and came from such 
a cjuarter that it did not trouble the sea within 
view. The two castles, black and ruinous as the 
rocks about them, were still distinguishable from 
these by something more insecure and fantastic in 
the outline, something that the last storm had left 
imminent and the next would demolish entirely. 
It would be difficult to render in words the sense 
of peace that took possession of me on these three 
afternoons. It was helped out, as I have said, by 
the contrast. The shore was battered and be- 



OF UNPLEASANT PLACES 117 

mauled by previous tempests ; I had the memory 
at heart of the insane strife of the pigmies who 
had erected these two castles and lived in them in 
mutual distrust and enmity, and knew I had only 
to put my head out of this little cup of shelter to 
find the hard wind blowing in my eyes; and yet 
there were the two great tracts of motionless blue 
air and peaceful sea looking on, unconcerned and 
apart, at the turmoil of the present moment and 
the memorials of the precarious past. There is 
ever something transitory and fretful in the im- 
pression of a high wind under a cloudless sky ; 
it seems to have no root in the constitution of 
things ; it must speedily begin to faint and whither 
away like a cut flower. And on those days the 
thought of the wind and the thought of human life 
came very near together in my mind. Our noisy 
years did indeed seem moments in the being of the 
eternal silence : and the wind, in the face of that 
great field of stationary blue, was as the wind of 
a butterfly's wing. The placidity of the sea was a 
thing likewise to be remembered. Shelley speaks 
of the sea as " hungering for calm," and in this 
place one learned to understand the phrase. Look- 
ing down into these green waters from the broken 
edge of the rock, or swimming leisurely in the 
sunshine, it seemed to me that they were enjoying 
their own tranquillity; and when now and again 
it was disturbed by a wind ripple on the surface, 
or the quick black passage of a fish far below, 
they settled back again (one could fancy) with 
relief. 



ii8 ON THE ENJOYMENT 

On shore too, in the Httle nook of shelter, every- 
thing was so subdued and still that the least par- 
ticular struck in me a pleasurable surprise. The 
desultory crackling of the whin-pods in the after- 
noon sun usurped the ear. The hot, sweet breath 
of the bank, that had been saturated all day long 
with sunshine, and now exhaled it into my face, 
was like the breath of a fellow-creature. I re- 
member that I was haunted by two lines of 
French verse; in some dumb way they seemed to 
fit my surroundings and give expression to the 
contentment that was in me, and I kept repeating 
to myself — 

" Mon coeur est un luth suspendu, 
Sitot qu'on le touche, il resonne." 

I can give no reason why these lines came to me 
at this time ; and for that very cause I repeat them 
here. For all I know, they may serve to complete 
the impression in the mind of the reader, as they 
were certainly a part of it for me. 

And this happened to me in the place of all 
others where I liked least to stay. When I think 
of it I grow ashamed of my own ingratitude. 
" Out of the strong came forth sweetness." There, 
in the bleak and gusty North, I received, perhaps, 
my strongest impression of peace. I saw the sea 
to be great and calm ; and the earth, in that little 
corner, was all alive and friendly to me. So, 
wherever a man is, he will find something to please 
and pacify him: in the town he will meet pleasant 
faces of men and women, and see beautiful flowers 



OF UNPLEASANT PLACES 119 

at a window, or hear a cage-bird singing at the 
corner of the gloomiest street ; and for the country, 
there is no country without some amenity — let 
him only look for it in the right spirit, and he will 
surely find. 



V 
AN AUTUMN EFFECT 

" Nous ne decrivons jamais mieux la nature que lorsqiie nous 
nous effor9ons d'exprinier sobrement et siniplement I'inipression 
que nous en avons regue." — M. Andre Theuriet, " L'Automne 
dans les bois," Revue des Deux Mondes, ist Oct., 1874, p. 562.1 

A COUNTRY rapidly passed through under 
favourable auspices may leave upon us a 
I- unity of impression that would only be 
disturbed and dissipated if we stayed longer. Clear 
vision goes with the quick foot. Things fall for 
us into a sort of natural perspective when we see 
them for a moment in going by; we generalise 
boldly and simply, and are gone before the sun 
is overcast, before the rain falls, before the sea- 
son can steal like a dial-hand from his figure, 
before the lights and shadows, shifting round 

^ I had nearly finished the transcription of the following pages, 
when I saw on a friend's fable the number containing the jiiece 
from which this sentence is extracted, and, struck with a similarity 
of title, took it home with me and read it with indescribable satisfac- 
tion. I do not know whether I more envy M. Theuriet the pleasure 
of having written this delightful article, or the reader the pleasure, 
which I hope he has still before him, of reading it once and again, 
and lingering over the passages that please him most. 



AN AUTUMN EFFECT 121 

towards nightfall, can show us the other side of 
things, and belie what they showed us in the 
morning. We expose our mind to the landscape 
(as we would expose the prepared plate in the 
camera) for the moment only during which the 
effect endures ; and we are away before the effect 
can change. Hence we shall have in our memo- 
ries a long scroll of continuous wayside pictures, 
all imbued already with the prevailing sentiment 
of the season, the weather, and the landscape, and 
certain to be unified more and more, as time goes 
on, by the unconscious processes of thought. So 
that we who have only looked at a country over 
our shoulder, so to speak, as we went by, will 
have a conception of it far more memorable and 
articulate than a man who has lived there all his 
life from a child upwards, and had his impression 
of to-day modified by that of to-morrow, and be- 
lied by that of the day after, till at length the 
stable characteristics of the country are all blotted 
out from him behind the confusion of variable 
effect. 

I began my little pilgrimage in the most enviable 
of all humours : that in which a person, with a 
sufficiency of money and a knapsack, turns his 
back on a town and walks forward into a country 
of which he knows only by the vague report of 
others. Such an one has not surrendered his will 
and contracted for the next hundred miles, like a 
man on a railway. He may change his mind at 
every finger-post, and, where ways meet, follow 
vague preferences freely and go the low road or 



122 AN AUTUMN EFFECT 

the high, choose the shadow or the sunshine, suffer 
himself to be tempted by the lane that turns im- 
mediately into the woods, or the broad road that 
lies open before him into the distance, and shows 

him the far-off spires of some city, or a range of | 

mountain-tops, or a rim of sea, perhaps, along a | 

low horizon. In short, he may gratify his every | 
whim and fancy, without a pang of reproving 

conscience, or the least jostle to his self-respect, j 

It is true, however, that most men do not possess | 

the faculty of free action, the priceless gift of \ 

being able to live for the moment only; and as | 

they begin to go forward on their journey, they j 

will find that they have made for themselves new [ 

fetters. Slight projects they may have entertained I 

for a moment, half in jest, become iron laws to | 

them, they know not why. They will be led by | 

the nose by these vague reports of which I spoke i 

above; and the mere fact that their informant | 

mentioned one village and not another will compel i 

their footsteps with inexplicable power. And yet i 

a little while, yet a few days of this fictitious lib- i 

erty, and they will begin to hear imperious voices [ 

calling on them to return ; and some passion, some < 

duty, some worthy or unworthy expectation, will i 

set its hand upon their shoulder and lead them I 
back into the old paths. Once and again we have 
all made the experiment. We know the end of it 

right well. And yet if we make it for the hun- i 

dredth time to-morrow, it will have the same ] 

charm as ever; our heart will beat and our eyes | 
will be bright, as we leave the town behind us, 



AN AUTUMN EFFECT 123 

and we shall feel once again (as we have felt so 
often before) that we are cutting ourselves loose 
for ever from our whole past life, with all its sins 
and follies and circumscriptions, and go forward 
as a new creature into a new world. 

It was well, perhaps, that I had this first en- 
thusiasm to encourage me up the long hill above 
High Wycombe; for the day was a bad day for 
walking at best, and now began to draw towards 
afternoon, dull, heavy, and lifeless. A pall of 
grey cloud covered the sky, and its colour reacted 
on the colour of the landscape. Near at hand, 
indeed, the hedgerow trees were still fairly green, 
shot through with bright autumnal yellows, bright 
as sunshine. But a little way off, the solid bricks 
of woodland that lay squarely on slope and hill- 
top were not green, but russet and grey, and ever 
less russet and more grey as they drew off into 
the distance. As they drew off into the distance, 
also, the woods seemed to mass themselves to- 
gether, and lie thin and straight, like clouds, upon 
the limit of one's view. Not that this massing 
was complete, or gave the idea of any extent of 
forest, for every here and there the trees would 
break up and go down into a valley in open order, 
or stand in long Indian file along the horizon, tree 
after tree relieved, foolishly enough, against the 
sky. I say foolishly enough, although I have seen 
the effect employed cleverly in art, and such long 
line of single trees thrown out against the cus- 
tomary sunset of a Japanese picture with a certain 
fantastic effect that was not to be despised; but 



124 AN AUTUMN EFFECT 

this was over water and level land, where it did 
not jar, as here, with the soft contour of hills and 
valleys. The whole scene had an indefinable look 
of being painted, the colour was so abstract and 
correct, and there was something so sketchy and 
merely impressional about these distant single trees 
on the horizon that one was forced to think of it 
all as of a clever French landscape. For it is rather 
in nature that we see resemblance to art, than in 
art to nature ; and we say a hundred times, " How 
like a picture ! " for once that we say, " How like 
the truth ! " The forms in which we learn to think 
of landscape are forms that we have got from 
painted canvas. Any man can see and understand 
a picture; it is reserved for the few to separate 
anything out of the confusion of nature, and see 
that distinctly and with intelligence. 

The sun came out before I had been long on my 
way; and as I had got by that time to the top of 
the ascent, and was now treading a labyrinth of 
confined by-roads, my whole view brightened con- 
siderably in colour, for it was the distance only 
that was grey and cold, and the distance I could 
see no longer. Overhead there was a wonderful 
carolling of larks which seemed to follow me as 
I went. Indeed, during all the time I was in that 
country the larks did not desert me. The air was 
alive with them from High ^Vycombe to Tring; 
and as, day after day, their " shrill delight " fell 
upon me out of the vacant sky, they began to take 
such a prominence over other conditions, and form 
so integral a part of my conception of the country, 



AN AUTUMN EFFECT 125 

that I could have baptised it " The Country of 
Larks." This, of course, might just as well have 
been in early spring ; but everything else was 
deeply imbued with the sentiment of the later year. 
There was no stir of insects in the grass. The 
sunshine was more golden, and gave less heat 
than summer sunshine ; and the shadows under the 
hedge were somewh.at blue and misty. It was 
only in autumn that you could have seen the 
mingled green and yellow of the elm foliage, and 
the fallen leaves that lay about the road, and 
covered the surface of wayside pools so thickly 
that the sun was reflected only here and there 
from little joints and pinholes in that brown coat 
of proof; or that your ear would have been 
troubled, as you went forward, by the occasional 
report of fowling-pieces from all directions and 
all degrees of distance. 

For a long time this dropping fire was the one 
sign of human activity that came to disturb me 
as I walked. The lanes were profoundly still. 
They would have been sad but for the sunshine 
and the singing of the larks. And as it was, there 
came over me at times a feeling of isolation that 
was not disagreeable, and yet was enough to make 
me quicken my steps eagerly when I saw some 
one before me on the road. This fellow-voyager 
proved to be no less a person than the parish con- 
stable. It had occurred to me that in a district 
which was so little populous and so Avell wooded, 
a criminal of any intelligence might play hide-and- 
seek with the authorities for months ; and this idea 



126 AN AUTUMN EFFECT 

was strengthened by the aspect of the portly con- 
stable as he walked by my side with deliberate 
dignity and turned-oiit toes. But a few minutes' 
converse set my heart at rest. These rural crimi- 
nals are very tame birds, it appeared. If my in- 
formant did not immediately lay his hand on an 
offender, he was content to wait ; some evening 
after nightfall there would come a tap at his door, 
and the outlaw, weary of outlawry, would give 
himself quietly up to undergo sentence, and re- 
sume his position in the life of the country-side. 
Married men caused him no disquietude whatever; 
he had them fast by the foot. Sooner or later they 
would come back to see their wives, a peeping 
neighbour would pass the word, and my portly 
constable would walk quietly over and take the 
bird sitting. And if there were a few who had 
no particular ties in the neighbourhood, and pre- 
ferred to shift into another county when they fell 
into trouble, their departure moved the placid con- 
stable in no degree. He was of Dogberry's opin- 
ion ; and if a man would not stand in the Prince's 
name, he took no note of him, but let him go, and 
thanked God he was rid of a knave. And surely 
the crime and the law were in admirable keeping; 
rustic constable was well met with rustic offender. 
The officer sitting at home over a bit of fire until 
the criminal came to visit him, and the criminal 
coming — it was a fair match. One felt as if this 
must have been the order in that delightful sea- 
board Bohemia where Florizel and Perdita courted 
in such sweet accents, and the Puritan sang psalms 



AN AUTUMN EFFECT 127 

to hornpipes, and the four-and-twenty shearers 
danced with nosegays in their bosoms, and chanted 
their three songs apiece at the old shepherd's fes- 
tival ; and one could not help picturing to oneself 
what havoc among good people's purses, and tribu- 
lation for benignant constables, might be worked 
here by the arrival, over stile and footpath, of a 
new Autolycus. 

Bidding good-morning to my fellow-traveller, 
I left the road and struck across country. It was 
rather a revelation to pass from between the hedge- 
rows and find cjuite a bustle on the other side, a 
great coming and going of school-children upon 
by-paths, and, in every second field, lusty horses 
and stout country-folk a-ploughing. The way I 
followed took me through many fields thus occu- 
pied, and through many strips of plantation, and 
then over a little space of smooth turf, very pleas- 
ant to the feet, set with tall fir-trees and clamorous 
with rooks making ready for the winter, and so 
back again into the quiet road. I was now not 
far from the end of my day's journey. A few 
hundred yards farther, and, passing through a gap 
in the hedge, I began to go down-hill through a 
pretty extensive tract of young beeches. I was 
soon in shadow myself, but the afternoon sun still 
coloured the upmost boughs of the wood, and made 
a fire over my head in the autumnal foliage. A 
little faint vapour lay among the slim tree-stems 
in the bottom of the hollow ; and from farther up 
I heard from time to time an outburst of gross 
laughter, as though clowns were making merry 



128 AN AUTUMN EFFECT 

in the bush. There was something about the at- 
mosphere that brought all sights and sounds home 
to one with a singular purity, so that I felt as if 
my senses had been washed with water. After I 
had crossed the little zone of mist, the path began 
to remount the hill ; and just as I, mounting along 
with it, had got back again, from the head down- 
wards, into the thin golden sunshine, I saw in front 
of me a donkey tied to a tree. Now, I have a 
certain liking for donkeys, principally, I believe, 
because of the delightful things that Sterne has 
written of them. But this was not after the pat- 
tern of the ass at Lyons. He was of a white 
colour, that seemed to fit him rather for rare 
festal occasions than for constant drudgery. Be- 
sides, he was very small, and of the daintiest pro- 
portions you can imagine in a donkey. And so, 
sure enough, you had only to look at him to see 
he had never worked. There was something too 
roguish and wanton in his face, a look too like 
that of a school-boy or a street Arab, to have sur- 
vived much cudgelling. It was plain that these 
feet had kicked off sportive children oftener than 
they had plodded with a freight through miry 
lanes. He was altogether a fine-weather, holiday 
sort of donkey ; and though he was just then 
somewhat solemnised and rueful, he still gave proof 
of the levity of his disposition by impudently wag- 
ging his ears at me as I drew near. I say he was 
somewhat solemnised just then ; for, with the ad- 
mirable instinct of all men ai,id animals under 
restraint, he had so wound and wound the halter 



AN AUTUMN EFFECT 129 

about the tree that he could go neither back nor 
Iforwards, nor so much as put down his liead to 
browse. There he stood, poor rogue, part puzzled, 
Ipart angry, part, 'I believe, amused. He had not 
given up hope, and dully revolved the problem in 
his head, giving ever and again another jerk at 
the few inches of free rope that still remained 
unwound. A humourous sort of sympathy for the 
creature took hold upon me. I went up, and, not 
without some trouble on my part, and much dis- 
trust and resistance on the part of Neddy, got him 
forced backwards until the whole length of the 
halter was set loose, and he was once more as 
free a donkey as I dared to make him. I was 
pleased (as people are) with this friendly action 
to a fellow-creature in tribulation, and glanced 
back over my shoulder to see how^ he was profit- 
ing' by his freedom. The brute was looking after 
me; and no sooner did he catch my eye than he 
put up his long white face into the air, pulled an 
impudent mouth at me, and began to bray deri- 
sively. If ever any one person made a grimace 
at another, that donkey made a grimace at me. 
The hardened ingratitude of his behaviour, and 
the impertinence that inspired his whole face as 
he curled up his lip, and showed his teeth, and 
began to bray, so tickled me, and was so much in 
keeping with wdiat I had imagined to myself about 
his character, that I could not find it in my heart 
to be angry, and burst into a peal of hearty laugh- 
ter. This seemed to strike the ass as a repartee, 
so he brayed at me again by way of rejoinder; 

9 



I30 AN AUTUMN EFFECT 



'I 



and we went on for awhile, braying and laugh- 
ing, until I began to grow a-weary of it, and. 
shouting a derisive farewell, turned to pursue my 
way. In so doing — it was like going suddenly 
into cold water — I found myself face to face with 
a prim little old maid. She was all in a flutter, 
the poor old dear ! She had concluded beyond 
question that this must be a lunatic who stood 
laughing aloud at a white donkey in the placid 
beech-woods. I was sure, by her face, that she 
had already recommended her spirit most reli- 
giously to Heaven, and prepared herself for the 
worst. And so, to reassure her, I uncovered and 
besought her, after a very staid fashion, to put 
me on my way to Great Missenden. Her voice 
trembled a little, to be sure, but I think her mind 
was set at rest ; and she told me, very explicitly, 
to follow the path until I came to the end of the 
wood, and then I should see the village below me 
in the bottom of the valley. And, with mutual 
courtesies, the little old maid and I went on our 
respective ways. 

Nor had she misled me. Great Missenden was 
close at hand, as she had said, in the trough of a 
gentle valley, with many great elms about it. The 
smoke from its chimneys went up pleasantly in 
the afternoon sunshine. The sleepy hum of a 
threshing-machine filled the neighbouring fields 
and hung about the quaint street corners. A 
little above, the church sits well back on its 
haunches against the hillside — an attitude for a 
church, you know, that makes it look as if it 



AN AUTUMN EFFECT 131 

could be ever so much higher if it Hked ; and the 
trees grew about it thickly, so as to make a den- 
sity of shade in the churchyard. A very quiet 
place it looks ; and yet I saw many boards and 
posters about threatening dire punishment against 
those who broke the church windows or defaced 
the precinct, and offering rewards for the appre- 
hension of those who had done the like already. 
It was fair-day in Great Missenden. There were 
three stalls set up, sub jovc, for the sale of pastry 
and cheap toys ; and a great number of holiday 
children thronged about the stalls, and noisily in- 
vaded every corner of the straggling village. They 
came round me by coveys, blowing simultaneously 
upon penny trumpets as though they imagined I 
should fall to pieces like the battlements of Jericho. 
I noticed one among them who could make a 
wheel of himself like a London boy, and seemingly 
enjoyed a grave pre-eminence upon the strength 
of the accomplishment. By-and-by, however, the 
trumpets began to weary me, and I went indoors, 
leaving the fair, I fancy, at its height. 

Night had fallen before I ventured forth again. 
It was pitch-dark in the village street, and the 
darkness seemed only the greater for a light here 
and there in an uncurtained \\nndow or from an 
open door. Into one such window I was rude 
enough to peep, and saw within a charming genre 
picture. In a room, all white wainscot and crim- 
son wall-paper, a perfect gem of colour after the 
black, empty darkness in which I had been grop- 
ing, a pretty girl was telling a story, as well as I 



132 AN AUTUMN EFFECT 

could make out, to an attentive child upon her 
knee, while an old woman sat placidly dozing over 
the fire. You may be sure I was not behindhand 
with a story for myself — a good old story after 
the manner of G. P. R. James and the village 
melodramas, with a wicked squire, and poachers, 
and an attorney, and a virtuous young man with 
a genius for mechanics, who should love, and 
protect, and ultimately marry the girl in the crim- 
son room. Baudelaire has a few dainty sentences 
on the fancies that we are inspired with when we 
look through a window into other people's lives; 
and I think Dickens has somewhere enlarged on 
the same text. The subject, at least, is one that 
I am seldom weary of entertaining. I remember, 
night after night, at Brussels, watching a good 
family sup together, make merry, and retire to 
rest ; and night after night I waited to see the 
candles lit, and the salad made, and the last salu- 
tations dutifully exchanged, without any abatement 
of interest. Night after night I found the scene 
rivet my attention and keep me awake in bed with 
all manner of quaint imaginations. Much of the 
pleasure of the Arabian Nights hinges upon this 
Asmodean interest; and we are not weary of lift- 
ing other people's roofs, and going about behind 
the scenes of life with the Caliph and the service- 
able Giaffar. It is a salutary exercise, besides ; it 
is salutary to get out of ourselves and see people 
living together in perfect unconsciousness of our 
existence, as they will live when we are gone. If 
to-morrow the blow falls, and the worst of our ill 



AN AUTUMN EFFECT 133 

fears is realised, the girl will none the less tell 
stories to the child on her lap in the cottage at 
Great Missenden, nor the good Belgians light their 
candle, and mix their salad, and- go orderly to 
bed. 

The next morning was sunny overhead and 
damp underfoot, with a thrill in the air like a 
reminiscence of frost. I went up into the sloping 
garden behind the inn and smoked a pipe pleas- 
antly enough, to the tune of my landlady's lamen- 
tations over sundry cabbages and cauliflowers that 
had been spoiled by caterpillars. She had been so 
much pleased in the summer-time, she said, to see 
the garden all hovered over by white butterflies. 
And now, look at the end of it ! She could no- 
wise reconcile this with her moral sense. And, 
indeed, unless these butterflies are created with a 
side-look to the composition of improving apo- 
logues, it is not altogether easy, even for people 
who have read Hegel and Dr. M'Cosh. to decide 
intelligibly upon the issue raised. Then I fell into 
a long and abstruse calculation with my landlord; 
having for object to compare the distance driven 
by him during eight years' service on the box of 
the Wendover coach with the girth of the round 
world itself. We tackled the question most con- 
scientiously, made all necessary allowance for Sun- 
days and leap-years, and were just coming to a 
triumphant conclusion of our labours when we 
were stayed by a small lacuna in my information. 
I did not know the circumference of the earth. 
The landlord knew it, to be sure — plainly he had 



134 AN AUTUMN EFFECT 

made the same calculation twice and once before, 
— but he wanted confidence in his own figures, 
and from the moment I showed myself so poor 
a second seemed to lose all interest in the result. 

Wendover (which was my next stage) lies in 
the same valley with Great Missenden, but at the 
foot of it, where the hills trend off on either hand 
like a coast-line, and a great hemisphere of plain 
lies, like a sea, before one. I went up a chalky 
road, until I had a good outlook over the place. 
The vale, as it opened out into the plain, was 
shallow, and a little bare, perhaps, but full of 
graceful convolutions. From the level to which 
I have now attained the fields were exposed be- 
fore me like a map, and I could see all that bustle 
of autumn field-work which had been hid from 
me yesterday behind the hedgerows, or shown to 
me only for a moment as I followed the footpath. 
Wendover lay well down in the midst, with moun- 
tains of foliage about it. The great plain stretched 
away to the northward, variegated near at hand 
with the cjuaint pattern of the fields, but growing 
ever more and more indistinct, until it became 
a mere hurly-burly of trees and bright crescents 
of river, and snatches of slanting road, and finally 
melted into the ambiguous cloud-land over the 
horizon. The sky was an opal-grey, touched here 
and there with blue, and with certain faint rus- 
sets that looked as if they were reflections of the 
colour of the autumnal woods below. I could 
hear the ploughmen shouting to their horses, the 
uninterrupted carol of larks innumerable overhead, 



AN AUTUMN EFFECT 135 

and, from a field where the shepherd was mar- 
shalhng his flock, a sweet tumidtiious tinkle of 
sheep-bells. All these noises came to me very 
tliiu and distinct in the clear air. There was a 
wonderful sentiment of distance and atmosphere 
about the day and the place. 

I mounted the hill yet farther by a rough stair- 
case of chalky footholds cut in the turf. The hills 
about Wendover and, as far as I could see, all 
the hills in Buckinghamshire, wear a sort of hood 
of beech plantation ; but in this particular case 
the hood had been suffered to extend itself into 
sometliing more like a cloak, and hung down about 
the shoulders of the hill in wide folds, instead of 
lying flatly along the summit. The trees grew 
so close, and their boughs were so matted to- 
gether, that the whole wood looked as dense as a 
bush of heather. The prevailing colour w'as a dull, 
smouldering red, touched here and there with vivid 
yellow. But the autumn had scarce advanced be- 
yond the outw^orks ; it was still almost summer 
in the heart of the wood ; and as soon as I had 
scrambled through the hedge, I found myself in 
a dim green forest atmosphere under eaves of 
virgin foliage. In places where the wood had 
itself for a background and the trees were massed 
together thickly, the colour became intensified and 
almost gem-like : a perfect fire of green, that 
seemed none the less green for a few specks of 
autumn gold. None of the trees w^ere of any 
considerable age or stature ; but they grew well 
together, I have said ; and as the road turned 



136 AN AUTUMN EFFECT 

and wound among them, they fell into pleasant 
groupings and broke the light up pleasantly. 
Sometimes there would be a colonnade of slim, 
straight tree-stems with the light running down 
them as down the shafts of pillars, that looked as 
if it ought to lead to something, and led only to 
a corner of sombre and intricate jungle. Some- 
times a spray of delicate foliage would be thrown 
out flat, the light lying flatly along the top of it, 
so that against a dark background it seemed al- 
most luminous. There was a great hush over the 
thicket (for, indeed, it was more of a thicket than 
a wood) ; and the vague rumours that went among 
the tree-tops, and the occasional rustling of big 
birds or hares among the undergrowth, had in 
them a note of almost treacherous stealthiness, that 
put the imagination on its guard and made me 
walk warily on the russet carpeting of last year's 
leaves. The spirit of the place seemed to be all 
attention; the wood listened as I went, and held 
its breath to number my footfalls. One could not 
help feeling that there ought to be some reason 
for this stillness : whether, as the bright old legend 
goes. Pan lay somewhere near in siesta, or whether, 
perhaps, the hea-^^en was meditating rain, and the 
first drops would soon come pattering through the 
leaves. It was not unpleasant, in such an humour, 
to catch sight, ever and anon, of large spaces of 
the open plain. This happened only where the path 
lay much upon the slope, and there was a flaw in 
the solid leafy thatch of the wood at some dis- 
tance below the level at which I chanced mvself 



AN AUTUMN EFFECT 137 

to be walking; then, indeed, little scraps of fore- 
shortened distance, miniature fields, and Lillipu- 
tian houses and hedgerow trees would appear for 
a moment in the aperture, and grow larger and 
smaller, and change and melt one into another, as 
I continued to go forw^ard, and so shift my point 
of view. 

For ten minutes, perhaps, I had heard from 
somewhere before me in the wood a strange, con- 
tinuous noise, as of clucking, cooing, and gob- 
bling, now and again interrupted by a harsh 
scream. As I advanced towards this noise, it 
began to grow lighter about me, and I caught 
sight, through the trees, of sundry gables and 
enclosure walls, and something like the tops of a 
rickyard. And sure enough, a rickyard it proved 
to be, and a neat little farm-steading, with the 
beech-woods growing almost to the door of it. 
Just before me, however, as I came up the path, 
the trees drew back and let in a wide flood of 
daylight on to a circular lawn. It was here that 
the noises had their origin. More than a score 
of peacocks (there are altogether thirty at the 
farm), a proper contingent of peahens, and a 
great multitude that I could not number of more 
ordinary barn-door fowls, were all feeding to- 
gether on this little open lawn among the beeches. 
They fed in a dense crowd, which swayed to and 
fro, and came hither and thither as by a sort of 
tide, and of which the surface was agitated like 
the surface of a sea as each bird guzzled his head 
along the ground after the scattered corn. The 



ijS AN AUTUMN EFFECT 

clucking, cooing noise that had led me thither was 
formed by the blending together of countless ex- 
pressions of individual contentment into one col- 
lective expression of contentment, or general grace 
during meat. Every now and again a big pea- 
cock would separate himself from the mob and 
take a stately turn or two about the lawn, or per- 
haps mount for a moment upon the rail, and there 
shrilly publish to the world his satisfaction with 
himself and what he had to eat. It happened, for 
my sins, that none of these admirable birds had 
anything beyond the merest rudiment of a tail. 
Tails, it seemed, were out of season just then. 
But they had their necks for all that ; and by their 
necks alone they do as much surpass all the other 
birds of our grey climate as they fall in quality 
of song below the blackbird or the lark. Surely 
the peacock, with its incomparable parade of glori- 
ous colour and the scrannel voice of it issuing 
forth, as in mockery, from its painted throat, must, 
like my landlady's butterflies at Great Missenden, 
have been invented by some skilful fabulist for 
the consolation and support of homely virtue : or 
rather, perhaps, by a fabulist not quite so skilful, 
who made points for the moment without having 
a studious enough eye to the complete effect ; for 
I thought these melting greens and blues so beau- 
tiful that afternoon, that I would have given them 
my vote just then before the sweetest pipe in all 
the spring woods. For indeed there is no piece 
of colour of the same extent in nature, that will 
so flatter and satisfy the lust of a man's eyes; 



AN AUTUMN EFFECT 139 

I and to C(3me upon so many of them, after these 
[ acres of stone-coloured heavens and russet woods, 
and grey-brown ploughlands and white roads, was 
like going three whole days' journey to the south- 
ward, or a month back into the summer. 

I was sorry to leave Peacock Farm — for so 
the place is called, after the name of its splendid 
pensioners — and go forwards again in the quiet 
woods. It began to grow both damp and dusk 
under the beeches ; and as the day declined the 
colour faded out of the foliage ; and shadow, 
without form and void, took the place of all the 
fine tracery of leaves and delicate gradations of 
living green that had before accompanied my 
walk. I had been sorry to leave Peacock Farm, 
but I was not sorry to find myself once more in 
the open road, under a pale and somewhat troubled- 
looking evening sky, and put my best foot fore- 
most for the inn at Wendover. 

Wendover, in itself, is a straggling, purposeless 
sort of place. Everybody seems to have had his 
own opinio;! as to how the street should go ; or 
rather, every now and then a man seems to have 
arisen with a new idea on the subject, and led 
away a little sect of neighbours to join in his 
heresy. It would have somewhat the look of an 
abortive watering-place, such as we may now see 
them here and there along the coast, but for the 
age of the houses, the comely quiet design of some 
of them, and the look of long habitation, of a life 
that is settled and rooted, and makes it worth 
while to train flowers about the windows, and 



I40 AN AUTUMN EFFECT 

otherwise shape the dwelhng to the humour of 
the inhabitant. The church, which might perhaps 
have served as rahying-point for these loose houses, 
and puhed the township into something hke in- 
tehigible unity, stands some distance off among 
great trees; but the inn (to take the pubhc build- 
ings in order of importance) is in what I un- 
derstand to be the principal street : a pleasant 
old house, with bay-windows, and three peaked 
gables, and many swallows' nests plastered about 
the eaves. 

The interior of the inn was answerable to the 
outside : indeed, I never saw any room much more 
to be admired than the low wainscoted parlour in 
which I spent the remainder of the evening. It 
was a short oblong in shape, save that the fireplace 
was built across one of the angles so as to cut it 
partially off, and the opposite angle was similarly 
truncated by a corner cupboard. The wainscot 
was white, and there was a Turkey carpet on the 
floor, so old that it might have been imported by 
Walter Shandy before he retired, worn almost 
through in some places, but in others making a 
good show of blues and oranges, none the less 
harmonious for being somewhat faded. The cor- 
ner cupboard was agreeable in design ; and there 
were just the right things upon the shelves — de- 
canters and tumblers, and blue plates, and one red 
rose in a glass of water. The furniture was old- 
fashioned and stiff. Everything was in keeping, 
down to the ponderous leaden inkstand on the 
round table. And you may fancy how pleasant it 



AN AUTUMN EFFECT 141 

looked, all Hushed and flickered over by the light 
of a brisk companionable fire, and seen, in a 
strange, tilted sort of perspective, in the three 
compartments of the old mirror above the chimney. 
As I sat reading in the great arm-chair, I kept look- 
ing round with the tail of my eye at the c|uaint, 
bright picture that was about me, and could not 
help some pleasure and a certain childish pride in 
forming part of it. The book I read was about 
Italy in the early Renaissance, the pageantries 
and the light loves of princes, the passion of 
men for learning, and poetry, and art ; but it 
was written, by good luck, after a solid, prosaic 
fashion, that suited the room infinitely more 
nearly than the matter; and the result was that 
I thought less, perhaps, of Lippo Lippi, or Lo- 
renzo, or Politian, than of the good Englishman 
who had written in that volume what he knew of 
them, and taken so much pleasure in his solemn 
polysyllables. 

I was not left without society. My landlord had 
a very pretty little daughter, whom we shall call 
Lizzie. If I had made any notes at the time, I 
might be able to tell you something definite of 
her appearance. But faces have a trick of growing 
more and more spiritualised and abstract in the 
memory, until nothing remains of them but a look, 
a haunting expression ; just that secret quality in 
a face that is apt to slip out somehow under the 
cunningest painter's touch, and leave the portrait 
dead for the lack of it. And if it is hard to catch 
with the finest of camel's-hair pencils, you may 



142 AN AUTUMN EFFECT 

think how hopeless it must be to pursue after it 
with clumsy words. If I say, for instance, that 
this look, which I remember as Lizzie, was some- 
thing wistful that seemed partly to come of slyness 
and in part of simplicity, and that I am inclined to 
imagine it had something to do with the daintiest 
suspicion of a cast in one of her large eyes, I shall 
have said all that I can, and the reader will not 
be much ad\'anced towards comprehension. I had 
struck up an acquaintance with this little damsel 
in the morning, and professed much interest in her 
dolls, and an impatient desire to see the large one 
which was kept locked away for great occasions. 
And so I had not been very long in the parlour 
before the door opened, and in came Miss Lizzie 
with two dolls tucked clumsily under her arm. 
She was followed by her brother John, a year or 
so younger than herself, not simply to play pro- 
priety at our interview, but to show his own two 
whips in emulation of his sister's dolls. I did my 
best to make myself agreeable to my visitors, show- j 
ing much admiration for the dolls and dolls' i 
dresses, and, with a very serious demeanour, ask- i 
ing many questions about their age and character, j 
I do not think that Lizzie distrusted my sincerity, i 
but it was evident that she was both bewildered 
and a little contemptuous. Although she was ready 
herself to treat her dolls as if they were alive, she j 
seemed to think rather poorly of any grown per- 
son who could fall heartily into the spirit of the 
fiction. Sometimes she would look at me with 
gravity and a sort of disquietude, as though she 



AN AUTUMN EFFECT 143 

really feared I must be out of my wits. Some- 
times, as when I inquired too particularly into the 
question of their names, she laughed at me so long 
and heartily that I began to feel almost embar- 
rassed. But when, in an evil moment, I asked 
to be allowed to kiss one of them, she could keep 
herself no longer to herself. Clambering down 
from the chair on which she sat perched to show 
me, Cornelia-like, her jewels, she ran straight out 
of the room and into the bar, — it was just across 
the passage, — and I could hear her telling her 
mother in loud tones, but apparently more in sor- 
row than in merriment, that the gentleman in the 
parlour zvantcd to kiss Dolly. I fancy she was 
determined to save me from this humiliating action, 
even in spite of myself, for she never gave me the 
desired permission. She reminded me of an old 
dog I once knew, \A'ho would never suffer the 
master of the house to dance, out of an exagger- 
ated sense of the dignity of that master's place and 
carriage. 

After the young people were gone there was but 
one more incident ere I went to bed. I heard a 
party of children go up and down the dark street 
for awhile, singing together sweetly. And the 
mystery of this little incident was so pleasant to 
me that I purposely refrained from asking who 
they were, and wherefore they went singing at so 
late an hour. One can rarely be in a pleasant place 
without meeting with some pleasant accident. I 
have a conviction that these children would not 
have gone singing before the inn unless the inn- 



144 AN AUTUMN EFFECT 

parlour had been the dehghtful place it was. At 
least, if I had been in the customary public room 
of the modern hotel, with all its disproportions 
and discomforts, my ears would have been dull, 
and there would have been some ugly temper or 
other uppermost in my spirit, and so they would 
have wasted their songs upon an unworthy 
hearer. 

Next morning I went along to visit the church. 
It is a long-backed red-and-white building, very 
much restored, and stands in a pleasant graveyard 
among those great trees of w'hich I have spoken 
already. The sky was drowned in a mist. Now 
and again pulses of cold wind went about the en- 
closure, and set the branches busy overhead, and 
the dead leaves scurrying into the angles of the 
church buttresses. Now and again, also, I could 
hear the dull sudden fall of a chestnut among the 
grass — the dog would bark before the rectory 
door — or there would come a clinking of pails 
from the stable-yard behind. But in spite of these 
occasional interruptions — in spite, also, of the 
continuous autumn twittering that filled the trees 
— the chief impression somehow was one as of 
utter silence, insomuch that the little greenish bell 
that peeped out of a window in the tower dis- 
quieted me with a sense of some possible and more 
inharmonious disturbance. The grass was wet, 
as if with a hoar-frost that had just been melted. 
I do not know that ever I saw a morning more 
autumnal. As I went to and fro among the graves, 
I saw some flowers set reverently before a recently 



AN AUTUMN EFFECT 145 

erected tomb, and drawing near was almost startled 
to find they lay on the grave of a man seventy-two 
years old when he died. We are accustomed to 
strew flowers only over the young, where love has 
been cut short untimely, and great possibilities 
have been restrained by death. We strew them 
there in token that these possibilities, in some deeper 
sense, shall yet be realised, and the touch of our 
dead loves remain with us and guide us to the end. 
And yet there was more significance, perhaps, and 
perhaps a greater consolation, in this little nosegay 
on the grave of one who had died old. We are 
apt to make so much of the tragedy of death, and 
think so little of the enduring tragedy of some 
men's lives, that we see more to lament for in a 
life cut off in the midst of usefulness and love, 
than in one that miserably survives all love and 
usefulness, and goes about the world the phantom 
of itself, without hope, or joy, or any consolation. 
These flowers seemed not so much the token of 
love that survived death, as of something yet more 
beautiful — of love that had lived a man's life out 
to an end with him, and been faithful and com- 
panionable, and not weary of loving, throughout 
all these years. 

The morning cleared a little, and the sky was 
once more the old stone-coloured vault over the 
sallow meadows and the russet woods, as I set 
forth on a dog-cart from Wendover to Tring. 
The road lay for a good distance along the side 
of the hills, with the great plain below on one 
hand, and the beech-woods above on the other. 



146 AN AUTUMN EFFECT 

The fields were busy with people ploughing and 
sowing; every here and there a jug of ale stood 
in the angle of the hedge, and I could see many a 
team wait smoking in the furrow as ploughman 
or sower stepped aside for a moment to take a 
draught. Over all the brown ploughlands, and 
under all the leafless hedgerows, there was a stout 
piece of labour abroad, and, as it were, a spirit of 
picnic. The horses smoked and the men laboured 
and shouted and drank in the sharp autumn morn- 
ing ; so that one had a strong effect of large, open- 
air existence. The fellow who drove me was 
something of a humourist ; and his conversation 
was all in praise of an agricultural labourer's way 
of life. It was he who called my attention to these 
jugs of ale by the hedgerow ; he could not suffi- 
ciently express the liberality of these men's wages; 
he told me how sharp an appetite was given by 
breaking up the earth in the morning air, whether 
with plough or spade, and cordially admired this 
provision of nature. He sang O fortimatos 
agricolas ! indeed, in every possible key, and with 
many cunning inflections, till I began to wonder 
what was the use of such people as Mr. Arch, 
and to sing the same air myself in a more diffi- 
dent manner. 

Tring was reached, and then Tring railway- 
station ; for the two are not very near, the good 
people of Tring having held the railway, of old 
days, in extreme apprehension, lest some day it 
should break loose in the town and work mischief. 
I had a last walk, among russet beaches as usual. 



AN AUTUMN EFFECT 147 

and the air filled, as usual, with the carolling of 
larks ; I heard shots fired in the distance, and saw, 
as a new sign of the fulfilled autumn, two horsemen 
exercising a pack of foxhounds. And then the 
train came and carried me back to London. 



VI 

A WINTER'S WALK IN CARRICK 
AND GALLOWAY 

(J Fragment : l8y6) 

A T the famous bridge of Doon, Kyle, the cen- 
ylA tral district of the shire of Ayr, marches 
X JL with Carrick, the most southerly. On the 
Carrick side of the river rises a hill of somewhat 
gentle conformation, cleft with shallow dells, and 
sown here and there with farms and tufts of wood. 
Inland, it loses itself, joining, I suppose, the great 
herd of similar hills that occupies the centre of 
the Lowlands. Towards the sea, it swells out the 
coast-line into a protuberance, like a bay-window 
in a plan, and is fortified against the surf behind 
bold crags. This hill is known as the Brown Hill 
of Carrick, or, more shortly, Brown Carrick. 

It had snowed overnight. The fields were all 
sheeted up; they were tucked in among the snow, 
and their shape was modelled through the pliant 
counterpane, like children tucked in by a fond 
mother. The wind had made ripples and folds 
upon the surface, like what the sea, in quiet 
weather, leaves upon the sand. There was a frosty 



CARRICK AND GALLOWAY 149 

stifle in the air. An effusion of coppery light on 
the summit of Brown Carrick showed where the 
snn was trying to look through; but along the 
horizon clouds of cold fog had settled down, so 
that there was no distinction of sky and sea. Over 
the white shoulders of the headlands, or in the 
opening of bays, there was nothing but a great 
vacancy and blackness ; and the road as it drew 
near the edge of the cliff seemed to skirt the shores 
of creation and void space. 

The snow crunched underfoot, and at farms all 
the dogs broke out barking as they smelt a passer- 
by upon the road. I met a fine old fellow, who 
might have sat as the father in " The Cottar's 
Saturday Night," and who swore most heathen- 
ishly at a cow he was driving. And a little after 
I scraped acquaintance with a poor body tramping 
out to gather cockles. His face was wrinkled by 
exposure; it was broken up into flakes and chan- 
nels, like mud beginning to dry, and weathered in 
two colours, an incongruous pink and grey. He 
had a faint air of being surprised — which, God 
knows, he might well be — that life had gone so 
ill with him. The shape of his trousers was in 
itself a jest, so strangely were they bagged and 
ravelled about his knees ; and his coat was all be- 
daubed with clay as though he had lain in a rain- 
dub during the New Year's festivity. I will own 
I was not sorry to think he had had a merry New 
Year, and been young again for an evening; but 
I was sorry to see the mark still there. One could 
not expect such an old gentleman to be much of 



I50 A WINTER'S WALK IN 

a dandy, or a great student of respectability in 
dress; but there might have been a wife at home, 
who had brushed out similar stains after fifty New 
Years, now become old, or a round-armed daughter, 
who would wish to have him neat, were it only out 
of self-respect and for the ploughman sweetheart 
when he looks round at night. Plainly, there was 
nothing of this in his life, and years and loneli- 
ness hung heavily on his old arms. He was seventy- 
six, he told me ; and nobody would give a day's 
work to a man that age : they would think he 
could n't do it. " And, 'deed," he went on, with 
a sad little chuckle, " 'deed, I doubt if I could." 
He said good-bye to me at a footpath, and crippled 
wearily off to his work. It will make your heart 
ache if you think of his old fingers groping in the 
snow. 

He told me I was to turn down beside the school- 
house for Dunure. And so, when I found a lone 
house among the snow, and heard a babble of 
childish voices from within, I struck off into a 
steep road leading dow^nwards to the sea. Dunure 
lies close under the steep hill : a haven among the 
rocks, a breakwater in consummate disrepair, much 
apparatus for drying nets, and a score or so of 
fishers' houses. Hard by, a few shards of ruined 
castle overhang the sea, a few vaults, and one tall 
gable honeycombed with windows. The snow lay 
on the beach to the tide-mark. It was daubed on 
to the sills of the ruin ; it roosted in the crannies 
of the rock like white sea-birds ; even on outlying 
reefs there would be a little cock of snow, like a 



CARRICK AND GALLOWAY 151 

toy lighthouse. Everything was grey and white 
in a cold and dolorous sort of shepherd's plaid. 
In the profound silence, broken only by the noise 
of oars at sea, a horn was sounded twice ; and I 
saw the postman, girt with two bags, pause a mo- 
ment at the end of the clachan for letters. It is, 
perhaps, characteristic of Dunure that none were 
brought him. 

The people at the public-house did not seem well 
pleased to see me, and though I would fain have 
stayed by the kitchen fire, sent me " ben the hoose " 
into the guest-room. This guest-room at Dunure 
was painted in quite aesthetic fashion. There are 
rooms in the same taste not a hundred miles from 
London, where persons of an extreme sensibility 
meet together without embarrassment. It was all 
in a fine dull bottle-green and black ; a grave har- 
monious piece of colouring, with nothing, so far 
as coarser folk can judge, to hurt the better feel- 
ings of the most exquisite purist. A cherry-red 
half window-blind kept up an imaginary warmth 
in the cold room, and threw quite a glow on the 
floor. Twelve cockle-shells and a halfpenny china 
figure were ranged solemnly along the mantel-shelf. 
Even the spittoon was an original note, and instead 
of sawdust contained sea-shells. And as for the 
hearth-rug, it would merit an article to itself, and 
a coloured diagram to help the text. It was patch- 
work, but the patchwork of the poor: no glowing 
shreds of old brocade and Chinese silk, shaken 
together in the kaleidoscope of some tasteful house- 
wife's fancy; but a work of art in its own way, 



1S2 A WINTER'S WALK IN 

and plainly a labour of love. The patches came 
exclusively from people's raiment. There was no 
colour more brilliant than a heather mixture; " My 
Johnnie's grey breeks," well polished over the oar 
on the boat's thwart, entered largely into its com- 
position. And the spoils of an old black cloth coat, 
that had been many a Sunday to church, added 
something (save the mark!) of preciousness to the 
material. 

While I was at luncheon four carters came in 
— long-limbed, muscular Ayrshire Scots, with lean, 
intelligent faces. Four quarts of stout were or- 
dered ; they kept filling the tumbler with the other 
hand as they drank ; and in less time than it takes 
me to write these words the four quarts were 
finished — another round was proposed, discussed, 
and negatived — and they were creaking out of the 
village with their carts. 

The ruins drew you towards them. You never 
saw any place more desolate from a distance, nor 
one that less belied its promise near at hand. Some 
crows and gulls flew away croaking as I scrambled 
in. The snow had drifted into the vaults. The 
clachan dabbled with snow, the white hills, the 
black sky, the sea marked in the coves with faint 
circular wrinkles, the whole world, as it looked 
from a loophole in Dunure, was cold, wretched, 
and out-at-elbows. If you had been a wicked 
baron and compelled to stay there all the after- 
noon, you would have had a rare fit of remorse. 
How you would have heaped up the fire and 
gnawed your fingers ! I think it would have come 



CARRICK AND GALLOWAY 153 

to homicide before the evening — if it were only 
for the pleasure of seeing something red ! And 
the masters of Dunnre, it is to be noticed, were 
remarkable of old for inhumanity. One of these 
vaults where the snow had drifted was that " black 
voute " where " Mr. Alane Stewart, Commenda- 
tour of Crossraguel," endured his fiery trials. On 
the I St and 7th of September, 1570 (ill dates for 
Mr. Alan!), Gilbert, Earl of Cassilis, his chaplain, 
his baker, his cook, his pantryman, and another 
servant, bound the poor Commendator " betwix an 
iron chimlay and a fire," and there cruelly roasted 
him until he signed away his abbacy. It is one of 
the ugliest stories of an ugly period, but not, some- 
how, without such a flavour of the ridiculous as 
makes it hard to sympathise quite seriously with 
the victim. And it is consoling to remember that 
he got away at last, and kept his abbacy, and, over 
and above, had a pension from the Earl until he 
died. 

Some way beyond Dunure a wide bay, of some- 
what less unkindly aspect, opened out. Colzean 
plantations lay all along the steep shore, and there 
was a wooded hill towards the centre, where the 
trees made a sort of shadowy etching over the 
snow. The road went down and up, and past a 
blacksmith's cottage that made fine music in the 
valley. Three compatriots of Burns drove up to 
me in a cart. They were all drunk, and asked me 
jeeringly if this was the way to Dunure. I told 
them it was ; and my answer was received with 
unfeigned merriment. One gentleman was so much 



154 A WINTER'S WALK IN 

tickled he nearly fell out of the cart ; indeed, he } 
was only saved by a companion, who either had not 
so fine a sense of humour or had drunken less. 

*' The toune of Mayboll," says the inimitable 
Abercrummie,^ '' stands upon an ascending ground 
from east to west, and lyes open to the south. It 
hath one principall street, with houses upon both 
sides, built of freestone ; and it is beautifyed with 
the situation of two castles, one at each end of this 
street. That on the east belongs to the Erie of 
Cassilis. On the west end is a castle, which be- 
longed sometime to the laird of Blairquan, which 
is now the tolbuith, and is adorned with a pyremide 
[conical roof], and a row of ballesters round it 
raised from the top of the staircase, into which 
they have mounted a fyne clock. There be four 
lanes which pass from the principall street ; one is 
called the Black Vennel, which is steep, declining 
to the south-west, and leads to a lower street, which 
is far larger than the high chiefe street, and it runs 
from the Kirkland to the Well Trees, in which 
there have been many pretty buildings, belonging 
to the severall gentry of the countrey, who were 
wont to resort thither in winter, and divert them- 
selves in converse together at their owne houses. 
It was once the principall street of the town ; but 
many of these houses of the gentry having been 
decayed and ruined, it has lost much of its ancient 
beautie. Just opposite to this vennel, there is an- 
other that leads north-west, from the chiefe street 

1 William Abercrombie. See Fasti Ecdesia Scoticana:, under 
" Maybole " (Part iii.). 



CARRICK AND GALLOWAY 155 

to the green, which is a pleasant plott of ground, 
enclosed round with an earthen wall, wherein they 
were wont to play football, but now at the Gowff 
and byasse-bowls. The houses of this towne, on 
both sides of the street, have their several gardens 
belonging to them ; and in the lower street there 
be some pretty orchards, that yield store of good 
fruit." As Patterson says, this description is near 
enough even to-day, and is mighty nicely written 
to boot. I am bound to add, of my own experience, 
that Maybole is tumbledown and dreary. Pros- 
perous enough in reality, it has an air of decay ; 
and though the population has increased, a roof- 
less house every here and there seems to protest 
the contrary. The women are more than well- 
favoured, and the men fine tall fellows ; but they 
look slipshod and dissipated. As they slouched at 
street corners, or stood about gossiping in the snow, 
it seemed they would have been more at home in 
the slums of a large city than here in a country 
place betwixt a village and a town. I heard a 
great deal about drinking, and a great deal about 
religious revivals : two things in which the Scot- 
tish character is emphatic and most unlovely. In 
particular, I heard of clergymen who were employ- 
ing their time in explaining to a delighted audience 
the physics of the Second Coming. It is not very 
likely any of us will be asked to help. If we were, 
it is likely we should receive instructions for the 
occasion, and that on more reliable authority. And 
so I can only figure to myself a congregation truly 
curious in such flights of theological fancy, as 



156 A WINTER'S WALK IN 

one of veteran and accomplished saints, who have 
fought the good fight to an end and outHved all 
worldly passion, and are to be regarded rather as 
a part of the Church Triumphant than the poor, 
imperfect company on earth. And yet I saw some 
young fellows about the smoking-room who seemed, 
in the eyes of one who cannot count himself strait- 
laced, in need of some more practical sort of teach- 
ing. They seemed only eager to get drunk, and to 
do so speedily. It was not much more than a week 
after the New Year; and to hear them return on 
their past bouts with a gusto unspeakable was not 
altogether pleasing. Here is one snatch of talk, 
for the accuracy of which I can vouch — 

" Ye had a spree here last Tuesday ? " 

" We had that ! " 

" I wasna able to be oot o' my bed. Man, I was 
awful bad on Wednesday." 

" Ay, ye were gey bad." 

And you should have seen the bright eyes, and 
heard the sensual accents ! They recalled their 
doings with devout gusto and a sort of rational 
pride. School-boys, after their first drunkenness, 
are not more boastful ; a cock does not plume 
himself with a more unmingled satisfaction as he 
paces forth among his harem ; and yet these were 
grown men, and by no means short of wit. It 
was hard to suppose they were very eager about 
the Second Coming: it seemed as if some ele- 
mentary notions of temperance for the men and 
seemliness for the women would have gone nearer 
the mark. And yet, as it seemed to me typical 



CARRICK AND GALLOWAY 157 

of much that is evil in Scotland, Maybole is also 
typical of much that is best. Some of the factories, 
which have taken the place of weaving in the 
town's economy, were originally founded and are 
still possessed by self-made men of the sterling, 
stout old breed — fellows who made some little 
bit of an invention, borrowed some little pocketful 
of capital, and then, step by step, in courage, thrift, 
and industry, fought their way upwards to an 
assured position. 

Abercrummie has told you enough of the Tol- 
booth ; but, as a bit of spelling, this inscription on 
the Tolbooth bell seems too delicious to withhold : 
" This bell is founded at Maiboll Bi Danel Geli, a 
Frenchman, the 6th November, 1696, Bi appoint- 
ment of the heritors of the parish of Maiyboll." 
The Castle deserves more notice. It is a large 
and shapely tower, plain from the ground up- 
wards, but with a zone of ornamentation running 
about the top. In a general way this adornment 
is perched on the very summit of the chimney- 
stacks ; but there is one corner more elaborate than 
the rest. A very heavy string-course runs round 
the upper storey, and just above this, facing up the 
street, the tower carries a small oriel window, 
fluted and corbelled and carved about with stone 
heads. It is so ornate it has somewhat the air of 
a shrine. And it was, indeed, the casket of a very 
precious jewel, for in the room to which it gives 
light lay, for long years, the heroine of the sweet 
old ballad of " Johnnie Faa " — she who, at the 
call of the gipsies' songs, " came tripping down 



158 A WINTER'S WALK IN 

the stair, and all her maids before her." Some 
people say the ballad has no basis in fact, and 
have written, I believe, unanswerable papers to the 
proof. But in the face of all that, the very look 
of that high oriel window convinces the imagina- 
tion, and we enter into all the sorrows of the im- 
prisoned dame. We conceive the burthen of the 
long, lack-lustre days, when she leaned her sick 
head against the mullions, and saw the burghers 
loafing in Maybole High Street, and the children 
at play, and ruffling gallants riding by from hunt 
or foray. We conceive the passion of odd mo- 
ments, when the wind threw up to her some snatch 
of song, and her heart grew hot within her, and 
her eyes overflowed at the memory of the past. 
And even if the tale be not true of this or that 
lady, or this or that old tower, it is true in the 
essence of all men and women : for all of us, some 
time or other, hear the gipsies singing; over all 
of us is the glamour cast. Some resist and sit 
resolutely by the fire. Most go and are brought 
back again, like Lady Cassilis. A few, of the 
tribe of Waring, go and are seen no more ; only 
now and again, at springtime, when the gipsies' 
song is afloat in the amethyst evening, we can 
catch their voices in the glee. 

By night it was clearer, and Maybole more vis- 
ible than during the day. Clouds coursed over the 
sky in great masses ; tlie full moon battled the 
other way, and lit up the snow wnth gleams of 
flying silver ; the town came down the hill in a 
cascade of brown gables, bestridden by smooth 



CARRICK AND GALLOWAY 159 

white roofs, and spangled here and there with 
hglited windows. At either end the snow stood 
high up in the darkness, on the peak of the Tol- 
booth and among the chimneys of the Castle. As 
the moon flashed a bull's-eye glitter across the town 
between the racing clouds, the white roofs leaped 
into relief over the gables and the chimney-stacks, 
and their shadows over the white roofs. In the 
town itself the lit face of the clock peered down 
the street ; an hour was hammered out on Mr. 
Geli's bell, and from behind the red curtains of 
a public-house some one trolled out — a compa- 
triot of Burns, again ! — " The saut tear blin's 
my e'e." 

Next morning there was sun and a flapping 
wind. From the street corners of Maybole I could 
catch breezy glimpses of green fields. The road 
underfoot was wet and heavy — part ice, part 
snow, part water ; and any one I met greeted me, 
by way of salutation, with " A fine thowe " (thaw). 
My w^ay lay among rather bleak hills, and past 
bleak ponds and dilapidated castles and monas- 
teries, to the Highland-looking village of Kirkos- 
wald. It has little claim to notice, save that Burns 
came there to study surveying in the summer of 
1777, and there also, in the kirkyard, the original 
of Tarn o' Shanter sleeps his last sleep. It is 
worth noticing, however, that this was the first 
place I thought " Highland-looking." Over the 
hill from Kirkoswald a farm-road leads to the 
coast. As I came down above Turnberry, the sea- 
view was indeed strangely different from the day 



i6o A WINTER'S WALK IN 

before. The cold fogs were all blown away; and 
there was Ailsa Craig, like a refraction, magnified 
and deformed, of the Bass Rock; and there were 
the chiselled moimtain-tops of Arran, veined and 
tipped with snow ; and behind, and fainter, the 
low, blue land of Cantyre. Cottony clouds stood, 
in a great castle, over the top of Arran, and blew 
out in long streamers to the south. The sea was 
bitten all over with white; little ships, tacking up 
and down the Firth, lay over at different angles 
in the wind. On Shanter they were ploughing lea ; 
a cart foal, all in a field by himself, capered and 
whinnied as if the spring were in him. 

The road from Turnberry to Girvan lies along 
the shore, among sand-hills and by wildernesses of 
tumbled bent. Every here and there a few cottages 
stood together beside a bridge. They had one odd 
feature, not easy to describe in words : a triangu- 
lar porch projected from above the door, supported 
at the apex by a single upright post ; a secondary 
door was hinged to the post, and could be hasped 
on either cheek of the real entrance ; so, whether 
the wind was north or south, the cotter could make 
himself a triangular bight of shelter where to set 
his chair and finish a pipe with comfort. There 
is one objection to this device : for, as the post 
stands in the middle of the fairway, any one pre- 
cipitately issuing from the cottage must run his 
chance of a broken head. So far as I am aware, 
it is peculiar to the little corner of country about 
Girvan. And that corner is noticeable for more 
reasons : it is certainly one of the most character- 



CARRICK AND GALLOWAY i6i 

istic districts in Scotland. It has this movable 
porch by way of architecture; it has, as we shall 
see, a sort of remnant of provincial costume, 
and it has the handsomest population in the 
Lowlands. . . . 



VII 

FOREST NOTES 

(1875-1876) 

I 

ON THE PLAIN 

PERHAPS the reader knows already the as- 
pect of the great levels of the Gatinais, 
where they border with the wooded hills 
of Fontainebleau. Here and there a few grey 
rocks creep out of the forest as if to sun them- 
selves. Here and there a few apple-trees stand 
together on a knoll. The quaint, undignified tar- 
tan of a myriad small fields dies out into the dis- 
tance ; the strips blend and disappear ; and the 
dead flat lies forth open and empty, with no acci- 
dent save perhaps a thin line of trees or faint 
church spire against the sky. Solemn and vast 
at all times, in spite of pettiness in the near de- 
tails, the impression becomes more solemn and 
vast towards evening. The sun goes down, a 
swollen orange, as it were into the sea. A blue- 
clad peasant rides home, with a harrow smokinj 
behind him among the dry clods. Another sti' 
works with his wife in their little strip. An ii 



FOREST NOTES 163 

mense shadow fills the plain ; these people stand 
in it up to their shoulders; and their heads, as 
they stoop over their work and rise again, are 
relieved from time to time against the golden 
sky. 

These peasant farmers are well off nowadays, 
and not by any means overworked ; but somehow 
you always see in them the historical representa- 
tive of the serf of yore, and think not so much 
of present times, which may be prosperous enough, 
as of the old days when the peasant was taxed 
beyond possibility of payment, and lived, in 
Michelet's image, like a hare between two fur- 
rows. These very people now weeding their 
patch under the broad sunset, that very man and 
his wife, it seems to us, have suffered all the 
wrongs of France. It is they who have been 
their country's scapegoat for long ages ; they who, 
generation after generation, have sowed and not 
reaped, reaped and another has garnered ; and 
who have now entered into their reward, and 
enjoy their good things in their turn. For the 
days are gone by when the Seigneur ruled and 
profited. " Le Seigneur," says the old formula, 
" enferme ses manants comme sous porte et gonds, 
du ciel a la terre. Tout est a lui, foret chenue, 
oiseau dans I'air, poisson dans I'eau, bete au buis- 
son, I'onde cpii coule, la cloche dont le son au loin 
uule." Such was his old state of sovereignty, a 
>cal god rather than a mere king. And now you 
iii ly ask yourself where he is, and look round for 
j*\ tiges of my late lord, and in all the country- 



i64 FOREST NOTES 

side there is no trace of him but his forlorn and 
fallen mansion. At the end of a long avenue, 
now sown with grain, in the midst of a close full 
of cypresses and lilacs, ducks and crowing chan- 
ticleers and droning bees, the old chateau lifts its 
red chimneys and peaked roofs and turning vanes 
into the wind and sun. There is a glad spring 
bustle in the air, perhaps, and the lilacs are all 
in flower, and the creepers green about the broken 
balustrade; but no spring shall revive the honour 
of the place. Old women of the people, little 
children of the people, saunter and gambol in the 
walled court or feed the ducks in the neglected 
moat. Plough-horses, mighty of limb, browse in 
the long stables. The dial-hand on the clock waits 
for some better hour. Out on the plain, where 
hot sweat trickles into men's eyes, and the spade 
goes in deep and comes up slowly, perhaps the 
peasant may feel a movement of joy at his heart 
when he thinks that these spacious chimneys 
are now cold, which have so often blazed and 
flickered upon gay folk at supper, while he 
and his hollow-eyed children watched through 
the night with empty bellies and cold feet. 
And perhaps, as he raises his head and sees the 
forest lying like a coast-line of low hills along 
the sea-like level of the plain, perhaps forest 
and chateau hold no unsimilar place in his 
affections. 

If the chateau was my lord's the forest was my 
lord the king's ; neither of them for this poor 
Jacques. If he thought to eke out his meagre 



FOREST NOTES 165 

way of life by some petty theft of wood for the 
fire, or for a new roof-tree, he found himself face 
to face with a whole department, from the Grand 
Master of the Woods and Waters, who was a 
high-born lord, down to the common sergeant, 
who was a peasant like himself, and wore stripes 
or a bandoleer by way of uniform. For the first 
offence, by the Salic law, there was a fine of fif- 
teen sols ; and should a man be taken more than 
once in fault, or circumstances aggravate the 
colour of his guilt, he might be whipped, branded, 
or hanged. There was a hangman over at 
Melun, and, I doubt not, a fine tall gibbet hard 
by the town gate, where Jacques might see his 
fellows dangle against the sky as he went to 
market. 

And then, if he lived near to a cover, there 
would be the more hares and rabbits to eat out 
his harvest, and the more hunters to trample it 
down. My lord has a new horn from England. 
He has laid out seven francs in decorating it with 
silver and gold, and fitting it with a silken leash 
to hang about his shoulder. The hounds have 
been on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Mesmer, 
or St. Hubert in the Ardennes, or some other holy 
intercessor who has made a specialty of the health 
of hunting-dogs. In the grey dawn the game 
was turned and the branch broken by our best 
piqueur. A rare day's hunting lies before us. 
Wind a jolly flourish, sound the bim-aUcr with 
all your lungs. Jacques must stand by, hat in 
hand, while the quarry and hound and huntsman 



i66 FOREST NOTES 

sweep across his field, and a year's sparing and 
labouring is as though it had not been. If 
he can see the ruin with a good enough grace, 
who knows but he may fall in favour with my 
lord ; who knows but his son may become the 
last and least among the servants at his lord- 
ship's kennel — one of the two poor varlets who 
get no wages and sleep at night among the 
hounds ? ^ 

For all that, the forest has been of use to 
Jacques, not only warming him with fallen wood, 
but giving him shelter in days of sore trouble, 
when my lord of the chateau, with all his troopers 
and trumpets, had been beaten from field after 
field into some ultimate fastness, or lay over-seas 
in an English prison. In these dark days, when 
the watch on the church steeple saw the smoke 
of burning villages on the sky-line, or a clump of 
spears and fluttering pennons drawing nigh across 
the plain, these good folk gat them up, with all 
their household gods, into the wood, whence, from 
some high spur, their timid scouts might overlook 
the coming and going of the marauders, and see 
the harvest ridden down, and church and cottage 
go up to heaven all night in flame. It was but 
an unhomely refuge that the woods afforded, where 
they must abide all change of weather and keep 
house with wolves and vipers. Often there was 
none left alive, when they returned, to show the 

1 " Deux poures varlez qui n'ont nulz gages et qui gissoient la 
miit avec les chiens." See Champollion-Figeac's Z«//> ^/ Charles 
d'Orlcans, i. 63, and for my lord's English horn, iliid. 96. 



FOREST NOTES 167 

old divisions of field from field. And yet, as times 
went, when the wolves entered at night into de- 
populated Paris, and perhaps De Retz was passing 
by with a company of demons like himself, even 
in these caves and thickets there were glad hearts 
and grateful prayers. 

Once or twice, as I say, in the course of the 
ages, the forest may have served the peasant well, 
but at heart it is a royal forest, and noble by old 
association. These woods have rung to the horns 
of all the kings of France, from Philip Augustus 
downwards. They have seen St. Louis exercise the 
dogs he brought with him from Egypt ; Francis I. 
go a-hunting with ten thousand horses in his train ; 
and Peter of Russia following his first stag. And 
so they are still haunted for the imagination by 
royal hunts and progresses, and peopled with the 
faces of memorable men of yore. And this dis- 
tinction is not only in virtue of the pastime of 
dead monarchs. Great events, great revolutions, 
great cycles in the affairs of men, have here left 
their note, here taken shape in some significant 
and dramatic situation. It was hence that Guise 
and his leaguers led Charles the Ninth a prisoner 
to Paris. Here, booted and spurred, and with all 
his dogs about him, Napoleon met the Pope beside 
a w^oodland cross. Here, on his way to Elba not 
so long after, he kissed the eagle of the Old Guard, 
and spoke words of passionate farewell to his sol- 
diers. And here, after Waterloo, rather than yield 
its ensign to the new power, one of his faithful 
regiments burned that memorial of so much toil 



i68 FOREST NOTES 

and glory on the Grand Master's table, and drank 
its dust in brandy, as a devout priest consumes 
the remnants of the Host. 



II 

IN THE SEASON 

Close into the edge of the forest, so close that 
the trees of the bornage stand pleasantly about the 
last houses, sits a certain small and very quiet 
village. There is but one street, and that, not 
long ago, was a green lane, where the cattle 
browsed between the door-steps. As you go up 
this street, drawing ever nearer the beginning of 
the wood, you will arrive at last before an inn 
where artists lodge. To the door (for I imagine 
it to be six o'clock on some fine summer's even), 
half a dozen, or maybe half a score, of people 
have brought out chairs, and now sit sunning 
themselves, and waiting the omnibus from Melun. 
If you go on into the court you will find as many 
more, some in the billiard-room over absinthe and 
a match of corks, some without over a last cigar 
and a vermouth. The doves coo and flutter from 
the dovecote; Hortense is drawing water from 
the well ; and as all the rooms open into the court, 
you can see the white-capped cook over the fur- 
nace in the kitchen, and some idle painter, who 
has stored his canvases and washed his brushes, 
jangling a waltz on the crazy, tongue-tied piano 
in the salle-a-manger. " Edmond, encore un ver- 



FOREST NOTES 169 

mouth," cries a man in velveteen, adding in a tone 
of apologetic afterthought, " tm double, s'il vous 
plait." "Where are you working?" asks one in 
pure white linen from top to toe. " At the Carre- 
four de I'Epine," returns the other in corduroy 
(they are all gaitered, by the way). " I couldn't 
do a thing to it. I ran out of white. Where were 
you ? " "I was n't working, I was looking for 
motives." Here is an outbreak of jubilation, and 
a lot of men clustering together about some new- 
comer with outstretched hands ; perhaps the " cor- 
respondence " has come in and brought So-and-so 
from Paris, or perhaps it is only So-and-so who 
has walked over from Chailly to dinner. 

" A table, Messieurs ! " cries M. Siron, bearing 
through the court the first tureen of soup. And im- 
mediately the company begins to settle down about 
the long tables in the dining-room, framed all 
round with sketches of all degrees of merit and 
demerit. There 's the big picture of the huntsman 
winding a horn with a dead boar between his legs, 
and his legs — well, his legs in stockings. And 
here is the little picture of a raw mutton-chop, in 
which Such-a-one knocked a hole last summer with 
no worse a missile than a plum from the dessert. 
And under all these works of art so much eating 
goes forward, so much drinking, so much jabber- 
ing in French and English, that it would do your 
heart good merely to peep and listen at the door. 
One man is telling how they all went last year to 
the fete at Fleury, and another how well So-and-so 
would sing of an evening; and here are a third and 



lyo FOREST NOTES 

fourth making plans for the whole future of their 
lives; and there is a fifth imitating a conjurer and 
making faces on his clenched fist, surely of all arts 
the most difficult and admirable ! A sixth has 
eaten his fill, lights a cigarette, and resigns him- 
self to digestion. A seventh has just dropped in, 
and calls for soup. Number eight, meanwhile, 
has left the table, and is once more trampling 
the poor piano under powerful and uncertain 
fingers. 

Dinner over, people drop outside to smoke and 
chat. Perhaps we go along to visit our friends at 
the other end of the village, where there is always 
a good welcome and a good talk, and perhaps some 
pickled oysters and white wine to close the evening. 
Or a dance is organised in the dining-room, and the 
piano exhibits all its paces under manful jockeying, 
to the light of the three or four candles and a lamp 
or two, while the waltzers move to and fro upon 
the wooden floor, and sober men, who are not given 
to such light pleasures, get up on the table or the 
sideboard, and sit there looking on approvingly 
over a pipe and a tumbler of wine. Or sometimes 
— suppose my lady moon looks forth, and the court 
from out the half-lit dining-room seems nearly 
as bright as by day, and the light picks out the 
window-panes, and makes a clear shadow under 
every vine-leaf on the wall — sometimes a picnic 
is proposed, and a basket made ready, and a good 
procession formed in front of the hotel. The two 
trumpeters in honour go before; and as we file 
down the long alley, and up through devious foot- 



FOREST NOTES 171 

paths among rocks and pine-trees, with every here 
and there a dark passage of shadow, and every 
here and there a spacious outlook over moonht 
woods, these two precede us and sound many a 
jolly flourish as they walk. We gather ferns and 
dry boughs into the cavern, and soon a good blaze 
flutters the shadows of the old bandits' haunt, and 
shows shapely beards and comely faces and toilettes 
ranged about the wall. The bowl is lit, and the 
punch is burnt and sent round in scalding thimble- 
fuls. So a good hour or two may pass with song 
and jest. And then we go home in the moonlight 
morning, straggling a good deal among the birch 
tufts and the boulders, but ever called together 
again, as one of our leaders winds his horn. Per- 
haps some one of the party will not heed the sum- 
mons, but chooses out some by-way of his own. As 
he follows the winding sandy road, he hears the 
flourishes grow fainter and fainter in the distance, 
and die finally out, and still walks on in the strange 
coolness and silence and between the crisp lights 
and shadows of the moonlit woods, until suddenly 
the bell rings out the hour from far-away Chailly, 
and he starts to find himself alone. No surf-bell 
on forlorn and perilous shores, no passing knoll 
over the busy market-place, can speak with a more 
heavy and disconsolate tongue to human ears. 
Each stroke calls up a host of ghostly reverberations 
in his mind. And as he stands rooted, it has grown 
once more so utterly silent that it seems to him he 
might hear the church bells ring the hour out all 
the world over, not at Chailly only, but in Paris, 



172 FOREST NOTES 

and away in outlandish cities, and in the village 
on the river, where his childhood passed between 
the sun and iiowers. 



Ill 

IDLE HOURS 

The vvoods by night, in all their uncanny effect, 
are not rightly to be understood until you can com- 
pare them with the woods by day. The stillness of 
the medium, the floor of glittering sand, these trees 
that go streaming up like monstrous sea-weeds and 
waver in the moving winds like the weeds in sub- 
marine currents, all these set the mind working on 
the thought of what you may have seen off a fore- 
land or over the side of a boat, and make you feel 
like a diver, down in the quiet water, fathoms below 
the tumbling, transitory surface of the sea. And 
yet in itself, as I say, the strangeness of these noc- 
turnal solitudes is not to be felt fully without the 
sense of contrast. You must have risen in the 
morning and seen the woods as they are by day, 
kindled and coloured in the sun's light ; you must 
have felt the odour of innumerable trees at even, 
the unsparing heat along the forest roads, and the 
coolness of the groves. 

And on the first morning you will doubtless rise 
betimes. If you have not been wakened before by 
the visit of some adventurous pigeon, you will be 
wakened as soon as the sun can reach your window 
— for there are no blinds or shutters to keep him 



FOREST NOTES 173 

out — and the room, with its bare wood floor and 
bare whitewashed wahs, shines all round you in a 
sort of glory of reflected lights. You may doze 
awhile longer by snatches, or lie awake to study 
the charcoal men and dogs and horses with which 
former occupants have defiled the partitions : 
Thiers, with wily profile ; local celebrities, pipe in 
hand ; or, maybe, a romantic landscape splashed 
in oil. Meanwhile artist after artist drops into 
the salle-a-manger for coffee, and then shoulders 
easel, sunshade, stool, and paint-box, bound into a 
fagot, and sets off for what he calls his " motive." 
And artist after artist, as he goes out of the village, 
carries with him a little following of dogs. For 
the dogs, who belong only nominally to any special 
master, hang about the gate of the forest all day 
long, and whenever any one goes by who hits their 
fancy, profit by his escort, and go forth with him to 
play an hour or two at hunting. They would like 
to-be under the trees all day. But they cannot go 
alone. They require a pretext. And so they take 
the passing artist as an excuse to go into the woods, 
as they might take a walking-stick as an excuse to 
bathe. With quick ears, long spines, and bandy 
legs, or perhaps as tall as a greyhound and with 
a bulldog's head, this company of mongrels will 
trot by your side all day and come home with you 
at night, still showing white teeth and wagging 
stunted tail. Their good-humour is not to be ex- 
hausted. You may pelt them with stones if you 
please, and all they will do is to give you a wider 
berth. If once they come out with you, to you 



174 FOREST NOTES 

they will remain faithful, and with you return : 
although if you meet them next morning in the 
street, it is as like as not they will cut you with a 
countenance of brass. 

The forest — a strange thing for an Englishman 
— is very destitute of birds. This is no country 
where every patch of wood among the meadows 
gives up an incense of song, and every valley wan- 
dered through by a streamlet rings and rever- 
berates from side to side with a profusion of clear 
notes. And this rarity of birds is not to be re- 
gretted on its own account only. For the insects 
prosper in their absence, and become as one of the 
plagues of Egypt. Ants swarm in the hot sand; 
moscjuitos drone their nasal drone ; wherever the 
sun finds a hole in the roof of the forest, you see 
a myriad transparent creatures coming and going 
in the shaft of light ; and even between-whiles, 
even where there is no incursion of sun-rays into 
the dark arcade of the wood, you are conscious 'of 
a continual drift of insects, an ebb and flow of 
infinitesimal living things between the trees. Nor 
are insects the only evil creatures that haunt the 
forest. For you may plump into a cave among the 
rocks, and find yourself face to face with a wild 
boar, or see a crooked viper slither across the road. 

Perhaps you may set yourself down in the bay 
between two spreading beech-roots with a book on 
your lap, and be awakened all of a sudden by a 
friend: "I say, just keep you where you are, 
■will you? You make the jolliest motive." And 
you reply: " Well, I don't mind, if I may smoke." 



FO REST NOTES 175 

And thereafter the hours go idly by. Your friend 
at the easel labours doggedly a little way off, in the 
wide shadow of the tree ; and yet farther, across a 
strait of glaring sunshine, you see another painter, 
encamped in the shadow of another tree, and up 
to his waist in the fern. You cannot watch your 
own effigy growing out of the white trunk, and the 
trunk beginning to stand forth from the rest of the 
wood, and the whole picture getting dappled over 
with the flecks of sun that slip through the leaves 
overhead, and, as a wand goes by and sets the trees 
a-talking, flicker hither and thither like butterflies 
of light. But you know it is going forward ; and, 
out of emulation with the painter, get ready your 
own palette, and lay out the colour for a woodland 
scene in words. 

Your tree stands in a hollow paved with fern and 
heather, set in a basin of lo^v hills, and scattered 
over with rocks and junipers. All the open is 
steeped in pitiless sunlight. Everything stands out 
as though it were cut in cardboard, every colour is 
strained into its highest key. The boulders are 
some of them upright and dead like monolithic 
castles, some of them prone like sleeping cattle. 
The junipers — looking, in their soiled and ragged 
mourning, like some funeral procession that has 
gone seeking the place of sepulchre three hundred 
years and more in wind and rain — are daubed in 
forcibly against the glowing ferns and heather. 
Every tassel of their rusty foliage is defined with 
pre-Raphaelite minuteness. And a sorry figure 
they make out there in the sun, like misbegotten 



176 FOREST NOTES 

yew-trees ! The scene is all pitched in a key of 
colour so peculiar, and lit up with such a discharge 
of violent sunlight, as a man might live fifty years 
in England and not see. 

Meanwhile at your elbow some one tunes up a 
song, words of Ronsard to a pathetic tremulous air, 
of how the poet loved his mistress long ago, and 
pressed on her the flight of time, and told her how 
white and quiet the dead lay under the stones, and 
how the boat dipped and pitched as the shades em- 
barked for the passionless land. Yet a little while, 
sang the poet, and there shall be no more love; 
only to sit and remember loves that might have 
been. There is a falling flourish in the air that 
remains in the memory and comes back in incon- 
gruous places, on the seat of hansoms or in the 
warm bed at night, with something of a forest 
savour. 

" You can get up now," says the painter ; " I 'm 
at the background." 

And so up you get, stretching yourself, and go 
your way into the wood, the daylight becoming 
richer and more golden, and the shadows stretch- 
ing farther into the open. A cool air comes along 
the highways, and the scents awaken. The fir- 
trees breathe abroad their ozone. Out of unknown 
thickets comes forth the soft, secret, aromatic odour 
of the woods, not like a smell of the free heaven, 
but as though court ladies, who had known these 
paths in ages long gone by, still walked in the sum- 
mer evenings, and shed from their brocades a 
breath of musk or bergamot upon the woodland 



FOREST NOTES 177 

winds. One side of the long- avenues is still kindled 
with the sun, the other is plunged in transparent 
shadow. Over the trees the west begins to burn 
like a furnace; and the painters gather up their 
chattels, and go down, by avenue or footpath, to 
the plain. 

IV 

A PLEASURE PARTY 

As this excursion is a matter of some length, 
and, moreover, we go in force, we have set aside 
our usual vehicle, the pony-cart, and ordered a 
large waggonette from Lejosne's. It has been 
waiting for near an hour, while one went to pack 
a knapsack, and t' other hurried over his toilette 
and coffee ; but now it is filled from end to end 
with merry folk in summer attire, the coachman 
cracks his whip, and amid much applause from 
round the inn door off we rattle at a spanking trot. 
The way lies through the forest, up hill and down 
dale, and by beech and pine wood, in the cheerful 
morning sunshine. The English get down at all 
the ascents and walk on ahead for exercise; the 
French are mightily entertained at this, and keep 
coyly underneath the tilt. As we go we carry with 
us a pleasant noise of laughter and light speech, and 
some one will be always breaking out into a bar 
or two of opera bouffe. Before we get to the 
Route Ronde here comes Desprez, the colourman 
from Fontainebleau, trudging across on his weekly 



178 FOREST N OTES 

peddle with a case of merchandise ; and it is " Des- 
prez, leave me some malachite green " ; " Desprez, 
leave me so much canvas " ; " Desprez, leave me 
this, or leave me that"; M. Desprez standing the 
while in the sunlight with grave face and many 
salutations. The next interruption is more im- 
portant. For some time back we have had the 
sound of cannon in our ears ; and now, a little past 
Franchard, we find a mounted trooper holding a 
led horse, who brings the waggonette to a stand. 
The artillery is practising in the Quadrilateral, it 
appears ; passage along the Route Ronde formally 
interdicted for the moment. There is nothing for 
it but to draw up at the glaring cross-roads, and 
get down to make fun with the notorious Cocardon, 
the most ungainly and ill-bred dog of all the un- 
gainly and ill-bred dogs of Barbizon, or clamber 
about the sandy banks. And meanwhile the Doctor, 
with sun umbrella, wide Panama, and patriarchal 
beard, is busy wheedling and (for aught the rest of 
us know) bribing the too facile sentry. His speech 
is smooth and dulcet, his manner dignified and in- 
sinuating. It is not for nothing that the Doctor 
has voyaged all the world over, and speaks all 
languages from French to Patagonian. He has 
not come home from perilous journeys to be 
thwarted by a corporal of horse. And so we soon 
see the soldier's mouth relax, and his shoulders 
imitate a relenting heart. " En voitnre, Messieurs, 
Mesdames," sings the Doctor ; and on we go again 
at a good round pace, for black care follows hard 
after us, and discretion prevails not a little over 



FOREST NOTES 179 

valour in some timorous spirits of the party. At 
any moment we may meet the sergeant, who will 
send us back. At any moment we may encounter 
a flying shell, which will send us somewhere farther 
off than Grez. 

Grez — for that is our destination — has been 
highly recommended for its beauty. " // y a de 
rcau," people have said, with an emphasis, as if 
that settled the question, which, for a French mind, 
I am rather led to think it does. And Grez, when 
we get there, is indeed a place worthy of some 
praise. It lies out of the forest, a cluster of houses, 
with an old bridge, an old castle in ruin, and a 
quaint old church. The inn garden descends in 
terraces to the river; stable-yard, kailyard, orchard, 
and a space of lawn, fringed with rushes and em- 
bellished with a green arbour. On the opposite 
bank there is a reach of English-looking plain, set 
thickly with willows and poplars. And between 
the two lies the river, clear and deep, and full of 
reeds and floating lilies. Water-plants cluster about 
the starlings of the long low bridge, and stand half- 
way up upon the piers in green luxuriance. They 
catch the dipped oar with long antennae, and chequer 
the slimy bottom with the shadow of their leaves. 
And the river wanders hither and thither among 
the islets, and is smothered and broken up by the 
reeds, like an old building in the lithe, hardy arms 
of the climbing ivy. You may watch the box where 
the good man of the inn keeps fish alive for his 
kitchen, one oily ripple following another over 
the top of the yellow deal. And you can hear a 



i8o FOREST NOTES 

splashing and a prattle of voices from the shed 
under the old kirk, where the village women wash 
and wash all day among the fish and water-lilies. 
It seems as if linen washed there should be specially- 
cool and sweet. 

We have come here for the river. And no sooner 
have we all bathed than we board the two shallops 
and push off gaily, and go gliding under the trees 
and gathering a great treasure of water-lilies. 
Some one sings ; some trail their hands in the cool 
water; some lean over the gunwale to see the 
image of the tall poplars far below, and the 
shadow of the boat, with the balanced oars and 
their own head protruded, glide smoothly over the 
yellow floor of the stream. At last, the day declin- 
ing — all silent and happy, and up to the knees in 
the wet lilies — we punt slowly back again to the 
landing-place beside the bridge. There is a wish 
for solitude on all. One hides himself in the arbour 
with a cigarette ; another goes a walk in the coun- 
try with Cocardon ; a third inspects the church. 
And it is not till dinner is on the table, and the 
inn's best wine goes round from glass to glass, that 
we begin to throw off the restraint and fuse once 
more into a jolly fellowship. 

Half the party are to return to-night with the 
waggonette ; and some of the others, loath to break 
up good company, will go with them a bit of the way 
and drink a stirrup-cup at Marlotte. It is dark in 
the waggonette, and not so merry as it might have 
been. The coachman loses the road. So-and-so 
tries to light fireworks with the most indifferent 



FOREST NOTES 



i«i 



success. Some sing, but the rest are too weary to 
applaud; and it seems as if tlie festival were fairly 
at an end — 

" Nous avons fait la noce, 
Rentrons a nos foyers ! " 

And such is the burthen, even after we have come 
to Marlotte and taken our places in the court at 
Mother Antonine's. There is punch on the long 
table out in the open air, where the guests dine in 
summer weather. The candles flare in the night 
wind, and the faces round the punch are lit up, with 
shifting emphasis, against a background of complete 
and solid darkness. It is all picturesque enough ; 
but the fact is, we are aweary. We yawn ; we are 
out of the vein ; we have made the wedding, as the 
song says, and now, for pleasure's sake, let 's make 
an end on 't. When here comes striding into the 
court, booted to mid-thigh, spurred and splashed, 
in a jacket of green cord, the great, famous, and 
redoubtable Blank ; and in a moment the fire kindles 
again, and the night is witness of our laughter 
as he imitates Spaniards, Germans, Englishmen, 
picture-dealers, all eccentric ways of speaking 
and thinking, with a possession, a fury, a strain of 
mind and voice, that would rather suggest a ner- 
vous crisis than a desire to please. We are as merry 
as ever when the trap sets forth again, and say 
farewell noisily to all the good folk going farther. 
Then, as we are far enough from thoughts of 
sleep, we visit Blank in his quaint house, and sit an 
hour or so in a great tapestried chamber, laid with 



i82 FOREST NOTES 

furs, littered with sleeping hounds, and lit up, in 
fantastic shadow and shine, by a wood fire in a me- 
diaeval chimney. And then we plod back through 
the darkness to the inn beside the river. 

How quick bright things come to confusion ! 
When we arise next morning, the grey showers fall 
steadily, the trees hang limp, and the face of the 
stream is spoiled with dimpling raindrops. Yester- 
day's lilies encumber the garden walk, or begin, dis- 
mally enough, their voyage towards the Seine and 
the salt sea. A sickly shimmer lies upon the drip- 
ping house-roofs, and all the colour is washed out 
of the green and golden landscape of last night, as 
though an envious man had taken a water-colour 
sketch and blotted it together with a sponge. We 
go out a-walking in the wet roads. But the roads 
about Gez have a trick of their own. They go on 
for awhile among clumps of willows and patches 
of vine, and then, suddenly and without any warn- 
ing, cease and determine in some miry hollow or 
upon some bald know ; and you have a short period 
of hope, then right-about face, and back the way 
you came! So we draw about the kitchen fire 
and play a round game of cards for ha'pence, or 
go to the billiard-room for a match at corks ; and 
by one consent a messenger is sent over for the 
waggonette — Grez shall be left to-morrow. 

To-morrow dawns so fair that two of the party 
agree to walk back for exercise, and let their knap- 
sacks follow by the trap. I need hardly say they 
are neither of them French ; for, of all English 
phrases, the phrase " for exercise " is the least 



FORESTNOTES 183 

comprehensible across the Straits of Dover. All 
goes well for awhile with the pedestrians. The 
wet woods are full of scents in the noontide. At 
a certain cross, where there is a guard-house, they 
make a halt, for the forester's wife is the daughter 
of their good host at Barbizon. And so there they 
are hospitably received by the comely woman, with 
one child in her arms and another prattling and 
tottering at her gown, and drink some syrup of 
quince in the back parlour, with a map of the forest 
on the wall, and some prints of love-afifairs and the 
great Napoleon hunting. As they draw near the 
Quadrilateral, and hear once more the report of the 
big guns, they take a by-road to avoid the sentries, 
and go on awhile somewhat vaguely, with the sound 
of the cannon in their ears and the rain beginning 
to fall. The ways grow wider and sandier ; here 
and there there are real sand-hills, as though by the 
sea-shore ; the fir-wood is open and grows in clumps 
upon the hillocks, and the race of sign-posts is no 
more. One begins to look at the other doubtfully. 
" I am sure we should keep more to the right," 
says one ; and the other is just as certain they should 
hold to the left. And now, suddenly, the heavens 
open, and the rain falls " sheer and strong and 
loud," as out of a shower-bath. In a moment they 
are as wet as shipwrecked sailors. They cannot see 
out of their eyes for the drift, and the water churns 
and gurgles in their boots. They leave the track 
and try across country with a gambler's despera- 
tion, for it seems as if it were impossible to make 
the situation worse; and, for the next hour, go 



i84 FOREST NOTES 

scrambling from boulder to boulder, or plod along 
paths that are now no more than rivulets, and 
across waste clearings where the scattered shells 
and broken fir-trees tell all too plainly of the can- 
non in the distance. And meantime the cannon 
grumble out responses to the grumbling thunder. 
There is such a mixture of melodrama and sheer 
discomfort about all this, it is at once so grey and 
so lurid, that it is far more agreeable to read and 
write about by the chimney-corner than to suffer 
in the person. At last they chance on the right 
path, and make Franchard in the early evening, 
the sorriest pair of wanderers that ever welcomed 
English ale. Thence, by the Bois d'Hyver, the 
Ventes-Alexandre, and the Pins Brules, to the clean 
hostelry, dry clothes, and dinner. 



THE WOODS IN SPRING 

I THINK you will like the forest best in the sharp 
early springtime, when it is just beginning to re- 
awaken, and innumerable violets peep from among 
the fallen leaves ; when two or three people at 
most sit down to dinner, and, at table, you will do 
well to keep a rug about your knees, for the nights 
are chill, and the salle-a-manger opens on the court. 
There is less to distract the attention, for one thing, 
and the forest is more itself. It is not bedotted 
with artists' sunshades as with unknown mush- 
rooms, nor bestrewn with the remains of English 



FOREST NOTES 185 

picnics. The hunting still goes on, and at any 
moment your heart may be brought into your 
mouth as you hear far-away horns ; or you may 
be told by an agitated peasant that the Vi- 
comte has gone up the avenue, not ten minutes 
since, " a fund de train, monsieur, et avec douze 
piquciirs." 

If you go up to some coign of vantage in the 
system of low hills that permeates the forest, you 
will see many different tracts of country, each of its 
own cold and melancholy neutral tint, and all mixed 
together and mingled the one into the other at the 
seams. You will see tracts of leafless beeches of a 
faint yellowish grey, and leafless oaks a little rud- 
dier in the hue. Then zones of pine of a solemn 
green ; and, dotted among the pines, or standing 
by themselves in rocky clearings, the delicate, snow- 
white trunks of birches, spreading out into snow- 
white branches yet more delicate, and crowned and 
canopied with a purple haze of twigs. And then a 
long, bare ridge of tumbled boulders, with bright 
sand-breaks between them, and wavering sandy 
roads among the bracken and brown heather. It 
is all rather cold and unhomely. It has not the 
perfect beauty, nor the gem-like colouring, of the 
wood in the later year, when it is no more than 
one vast colonnade of verdant shadow, tremulous 
with insects, intersected here and there by lanes 
of sunlight set in purple heather. The loveliness 
of the woods in March is not, assuredly, of this 
blowzy rustic type. It is made sharp with a grain 
of salt, with a touch of ugliness. It has a sting 



i86 FOREST NOTES 

like the sting of bitter ale; you acquire the love 
of it as men acquire a taste for olives. And the 
wonderful clear, pure air wells into your lungs 
the while by voluptuous inhalations, and makes the 
eyes bright, and sets the heart tinkling to a new 
tune — or, rather, to an old tune ; for you remem- 
ber in your boyhood something akin to this spirit 
of adventure, this thirst for exploration, that now 
takes you masterfully by the hand, plunges you 
into many a deep grove, and drags you over many 
a stony crest. It is as if the whole wood were full 
of friendly voices calling you farther in, and you 
turn from one side to another, like Buridan's 
donkey, in a maze of pleasure. 

Comely beeches send up their white, straight, 
clustered branches, barred with green moss, like 
so many fingers from a half-clenched hand. Mighty 
oaks stand to the ankles in a fine tracery of under- 
wood ; thence the tall shaft climbs upwards, and the 
great forest of stalwart boughs spreads out into 
the golden evening sky, where the rooks are flying 
and calling. On the sward of the Bois d'Hyver the 
firs stand well asunder with outspread arms, like 
fencers saluting; and the air smells of resin all 
around, and the sound of the axe is rarely still. 
But strangest of all, and in appearance oldest of all, 
are the dim and wizard upland districts of young 
wood. The ground is carpeted with fir-tassel, and 
strewn with fir-apples and flakes of fallen bark. 
Rocks lie crouching in the thicket, guttered with 
rain, tufted with lichen, white with years and the 
rigours of the changeful seasons. Brown and 



FO REST NOTES 187 

yellow butterflies are sown and carried away again 
by the light air — like thistledown. The loneliness 
of these coverts is so excessive, that there are mo- 
ments when pleasure draws to the verge of fear. 
You listen and listen for some noise to break 
the silence, till you grow half mesmerised by the 
intensity of the strain ; your sense of your own 
identity is troubled ; your brain reels, like that 
of some gymnosophist poring on his own nose 
in Asiatic jungles ; and should you see your 
own outspread feet, you see them, not as any- 
thing of yours, but as a feature of the scene 
around you. 

Still the forest is always, but the stillness is not 
always unbroken. You can hear the wind pass in 
the distance over the tree-tops; sometimes briefly, 
like the noise of a train ; sometimes with a long 
steady rush, like the breaking of waves. And some- 
times, close at hand, the branches move, a moan 
goes through the thicket, and the wood thrills to 
its heart. Perhaps you may hear a carriage on the 
road to Fontainebleau, a bird gives a dry continual 
chirp, the dead leaves rustle underfoot, or you may 
time your steps to the steady recurrent strokes of 
the woodman's axe. From time to time, over the 
low grounds, a flight of rooks goes by ; and from 
time to time the cooing of wild doves falls upon the 
ear, not sweet and rich and near at hand as in 
England, but a sort of voice of the woods, thin and 
far away, as fits these solemn places. Or you hear 
suddenly the hollow, eager, violent barking of 
dogs ; scared deer flit past you through the fringes 



i88 FOREST NOTES 

of the wood ; then a man or two running, in green 
blouse, with gun and game-bag on a bandoleer; 
and then, out of the thick of the trees, comes the jar 
of rifle-shots. Or perhaps the hounds are out, and 
horns are blown, and scarlet-coated huntsmen flash 
through the clearings, and the solid noise of horses 
galloping passes below you, where you sit perched 
among the rocks and heather. The boar is afoot, 
and all over the forest, and in all neighbouring 
villages, there is a vague excitement and a vague 
hope ; for who knows whither the chase may lead ? 
and even to have seen a single picjueur, or spoken 
to a single sportsman, is to be a man of consequence 
for the night. 

Besides men who shoot and men who ride with 
the hounds, there are few people in the forest, in 
the early spring, save wood-cutters plying their 
axes steadily, and old women and children gather- 
ing wood for the fire. You may meet such a party 
coming home in the twilight : the old woman laden 
with a fagot of chips, and the little ones hauling a 
long branch behind them in her wake. That is the 
worst of what there is to encounter; and if I tell 
you of what once happened to a friend of mine, it 
is by no means to tantalise you with false hopes; 
for the adventure was unique. It was on a very 
cold, still, sunless morning, with a flat grey sky 
and a frosty tingle in the air, that this friend (who 
shall here be nameless) heard the notes of a key- 
bugle played with much hesitation, and saw the 
smoke of a fire spread out along the green pine- 
tops, in a remote uncanny glen, hard by a hill of 



FOREST NOTES 189 

naked boulders. He drew near warily, and beheld 
a picnic party seated under a tree in an open. The 
old father knitted a sock, the mother sat staring at 
the fire. The eldest son, in the uniform of a private 
of dragoons, was choosing out notes on a key-bugle. 
Two or three daughters lay in the neighbourhood 
picking violets. And the whole party as grave and 
silent as the woods around them ! My friend 
watched for a long time, he says ; but all held their 
peace ; not one spoke or smiled ; only the dragoon 
kept choosing out single notes upon the bugle, and 
the father knitted away at his work and made 
strange movements the while with his flexible eye- 
brows. They took no notice whatever of my 
friend's presence, which was disquieting in itself, 
and increased the resemblance of the whole party 
to mechanical waxworks. Certainly, he affirms, 
a wax figure might have played the bugle with 
more spirit than that strange dragoon. And as 
this hypothesis of his became more certain, the aw- 
ful insolubility of why they should be left out there 
in the woods with nobody to wind them up again 
when they ran down, and a growing disquietude as 
to what might happen next, became too much for 
his courage, and he turned tail, and fairly took to 
his heels. It might have been a singing in his ears, 
but he fancies he was followed as he ran by a peal 
of Titanic laughter. Nothing has ever transpired 
to clear up the mystery ; it may be they were 
automata; or it may be (and this is the theory to 
which I lean myself) that this is all another chapter 
of Heine's " Gods in Exile "; that the upright old 



I90 FOREST NOTES 

man with the eyebrows was no other than Father 
Jove, and the young dragoon with the taste for 
music either Apollo or Mars. 



VI 

MORALITY 

Strange indeed is the attraction of the forest 
for the minds of men. Not one or two only, but a 
great chorus of grateful voices have arisen to 
spread abroad its fame. Half the famous writers 
of modern France have had their word to say about 
Fontainebleau. Chateaubriand, Michelet, Beranger. 
George Sand, de Senancour, Flaubert, Murger, the 
brothers Goncourt, Theodore de Banville, each of 
these has done something to the eternal praise and 
memory of these woods. Even at the very worst 
of times, even when the picturesque was anathema 
in the eyes of all Persons of Taste, the forest still 
preserved a certain reputation for beauty. It was 
in 1730 that the Abbe Guilbert published his His- 
torical Description of the Palace, Town, and For- 
est of Fontainebleau. And very droll it is to see 
him, as he tries to set forth his admiration in terms 
of what was then permissible. The monstrous 
rocks, etc., says the Abbe, " sont admirees avec sur- 
prise des voyageurs qui s'ecrient aussitot avec 
Horace : Ut mihi devio rupes et vacuum nemus 
mirari libet." The good man is not exactly lyrical 
in his praise; and you see how he sets his back 
against Horace as against a trusty oak. Horace, at 



FOREST NOTES 191 

any rate, was classical. For the rest, however, the 
':. Abbe Hkes places where many alleys meet ; or 
•■ which, like the Belle-Etoile, are kept up " by a 
special gardener," and admires at the Table du Roi 
pthe labours of the Grand Master of Woods and 
Waters, the Sieur de la Falure, " qui a fait faire 
ice magnifiqiie cndroit." 

But indeed, it is not so much for its beauty that 
the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for 
that subtle something, that quality of the air, that 
I emanation from the old trees, that so wonderfully 
Khanges and renews a weary spirit. Disappointed 
[men, sick Francis Firsts and vanquished Grand 
I Monarchs, time out of mind have come here for 
'jconsolation. Hither perplexed folk have retired 
[out of the press of life, as into a deep bay-window 
'jon some night of masquerade, and here found 
quiet and silence, and rest, the mother of wisdom. 
It is the great moral spa ; this forest without a 
fountain is itself the great fountain of Juventius. 
It is the best place in the world to bring an old 
sorrow that has been a long while your friend and 
enemy; and if, like Bcranger's, your gaiety has 
?run away from home and left open the door for 
sorrow to come in, of all covers in Europe, it 
is here you may expect to find the truant hid. 
With every hour you change. The air penetrates 
through your clothes, and nestles to your living 
body. You love exercise and slumber, long fast- 
ling and full meals. You forget all your scru- 
ples and live awhile in peace and freedom, and 
for the moment only. For here, all is absent that 



192 FOREST NOTES 

can stimulate to moral feeling. Such people as you 
see may be old, or toil-worn, or sorry ; but you see 
them framed in the forests, like figures on a painted 
canvas ; and for you, they are not people in any 
living and kindly sense. You forget the grim con- 
trariety of interests. You forget the narrow lane 
where all men jostle together in unchivalrous con- 
tention, and the kennel, deep and unclean, that gapes 
on either hand for the defeated. Life is simple 
enough, it seems, and the veiy idea of sacrifice be- 
comes like a mad fancy out of a last night's dream. 
Your ideal is not perhaps high, but it is plain 
and possible. You become enamoured of a life 
of change and movement and the open air, where 
the muscles shall be more exercised than the affec- 
tions. When you have had your will of the forest, 
you may visit the whole round world. You may 
buckle on your knapsack and take the road on foot. 
You may bestride a good nag, and ride forth, with 
a pair of saddle-bags, into the enchanted East. 
You may cross the Black Forest, and see Germany 
wide-spread before you, like a map, dotted with old 
cities, walled and spired, that dream all day on 
their own reflections in the Rhine or Danube. You 
may pass the spinal cord of Europe and go down 
from Alpine glaciers to where Italy extends her 
marble moles and glasses her marble palaces in 
the midland sea. You may sleep in flying trains 
or wayside taverns. You may be awakened at 
dawn by the scream of the express or the small 
pipe of the robin in the hedge. For you the rain 
should allay the dust of the beaten road ; the j 



FOREST NOTES 193 

wind dry your clothes upon you as you walked. 
Autumn should hang out russet pears and purple 
grapes along the lane ; inn after inn proffer you 
their cups of raw wine ; river by river receive your 
body in the sultry noon. Wherever you went warm 
valleys and high trees and pleasant villages should 
compass you about ; and light fellowships should 
take you by the arm, and walk with you an hour 
upon your way. You may see from afar off what 
it will come to in the end — the weather-beaten 
red-nosed vagabond, consumed by a fever of the 
feet, cut off from all near touch of human sympa- 
thy, a waif, an Ishmael, and an outcast. And yet 
it will seem well — and yet, in the air of the forest, 
this will seem the best — to break all the network 
bound about your feet by birth and old companion- 
ship and loyal love, and bear your shovelful of 
phosphates to and fro, in town and country, until 
the hour of the great dissolvent. 

Or, perhaps, you will keep to the cover. For the 
forest is by itself, and forest life owns small kin- 
ship with life in the dismal land of labour. Men 
are so far sophisticated that they cannot take the 
world as it is given to them by the sight of their 
eyes. Not only what they see and hear, but what 
they know to be behind, enter into their notion of a 
place. If the sea, for instance, lie just across the 
hills, sea-thoughts will come to them at intervals, 
and the tenor of their dreams from time to time 
will suffer a sea-change. And so here, in this 
forest, a knowledge of its greatness is for much in 
the effect produced. You reckon up the miles that 

13 



194 



FOREST NOTES 



lie between you and intrusion. You may walk 
before you all day long, and not fear to touch the 
barrier of your Eden, or stumble out of fairyland 
into the land of gin and steam-hammers. And 
there is an old tale enhances for the imagination 
the grandeur of the woods of France, and secures 
you in the thought of your seclusion. When 
Charles VI. hunted in the time of his wild boy- 
hood near Senlis, there was captured an old stag, 
having a collar of bronze about his neck, and 
these words engraved on the collar: " Cccsar inihi 
hoc donavit." It is no wonder if the minds of men 
were moved at this occurrence and they stood 
aghast to find themselves thus touching hands with 
forgotten ages, and following an antiquity with 
hound and horn. And even for you, it is scarcely 
in an idle curiosity that you ponder how many cen- 
turies this stag had carried its free antlers through 
the wood, and how many summers and winters had 
shone and snowed on the imperial badge. If the 
extent of solemn wood could thus safeguard a tall 
stag from the hunters' hounds and horses, might 
not you also play hide-and-seek, in these groves, 
with all the pangs and trepidations of man's life, 
and elude Death, the mighty hunter, for more than 
the span of human years? Here, also, crash his 
arrows ; here, in the farthest glade, sounds the 
gallop of the pale horse. But he does not hunt this 
cover with all his hounds, for the game is thin 
and small : and if you were but alert and wary, 
if you lodged ever in the deepest thickets, you too 
miQ-ht live on into later "enerations and astonish 



FOREST NOTES 195 

men by your stalwart age and the trophies of an 
immemorial success. 

For the forest takes away from you all excuse 
to die. There is nothing here to cabin or thwart 
your free desires. Here all the impudences of the 
brawling world reach you no more. You may 
count your hours, like Endymion, by the strokes of 
the lone wood-cutter, or by the progression of the 
lights and shadows and the sun wheeling his wide 
circuit through the naked heaA'ens. Here shall 
you see no enemies but winter and rough weather. 
And if a pang comes to you at all, it will be a pang 
of healthful hunger. All the puling sorrows, all 
the carking repentance, all this talk of duty that 
is no duty, in the great peace, in the pure daylight 
of these woods, fall away from you like a garment. 
And if perchance you come forth upon an eminence, 
where the wind blows upon you large and fresh, 
and the pines knock their long stems together, like 
an ungainly sort of puppets, and see far away over 
the plain a factory chimney defined against the pale 
horizon — it is for you, as for the staid and simple 
peasant when, with his plough, he upturns old arms 
and harness from the furrow of the glebe. Ay, 
sure enough, there was a battle there in the old 
times ; and, sure enough, there is a world out yonder 
where men strive together with a noise of oaths 
and weeping and clamorous dispute. So much you 
apprehend by an athletic act of the imagination. 
A faint far-off rumour as of Merovingian wars ; 
a lesrend as of some dead religion. 



VIII 
A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE 

LE MONASTIER is the chief place of a hilly 
canton in Haute Loire, the ancient Velay. 
^ As the name betokens, the town is of 
monastic origin ; and it still contains a towered 
bulk of monastery and a church of some architec- 
tural pretensions, the seat of an arch-priest and 
several vicars. It stands on the side of a hill above 
the river Gazeille, about fifteen miles from Le Puy, 
up a steep road where the wolves sometimes pursue 
the diligence in winter. The road, which is bound 
for Vivarais, passes through the town from end 
to end in a single narrow street ; there you may 
see the fountain w^here women fill their pitchers ; 
there also some old houses with carved doors and 
pediments and ornamental work in iron. For Mo- 
nastier, like Maybole in Ayrshire, was a sort of 
country capital, where the local aristocracy had 
their town mansions for the winter ; and there is 
a certain baron still alive and, I am told, extremely 
penitent, who found means to ruin himself by high 
living in this village on the hills. He certainly has 
claims to be considered the most remarkable spend- 
thrift on record. How he set about it, in a place 



IN FRANCE 197 

where there are no luxuries for sale, and where the 
board at the best inn comes to little more than a 
shilling a day, is a problem for the wise. His son, 
ruined as the family was, went as far as Paris to 
sow his wild oats ; and so the cases of father and 
son mark an epoch in the history of centralisation 
in France. Not until the latter had got into the 
train was the work of Richelieu complete. 

It is a people of lace-makers. The women sit in 
the streets by groups of five or six ; and the noise 
of the bobbins is audible from one group to an- 
other. Now and then you will hear one woman 
clattering off prayers for the edification of the 
others at their work. They wear gaudy shawls, 
white caps with a gay ribbon about the head, and 
sometimes a black felt brigand hat above the cap ; 
and so they give the street colour and brightness 
and a foreign air. Awhile ago, when England 
largely supplied herself from this district with the 
lace called torchon, it was not unusual to earn 
five francs a day ; and five francs in Monastier is 
worth a pound in London. Now, from a change 
in the market, it takes a clever and industrious 
work-woman to earn from three to four in the 
week, or less than an eighth of what she made 
easily a few years ago. The tide of prosperity 
came and went, as with our northern pitmen, and 
left nobody the richer. The women bravely 
squandered their gains, kept the men in idleness, 
and gave themselves up, as I was told, to sweet- 
hearting and a merry life. From week's end to 
week's end it was one continuous gala in Monas- 



198 A MOUNTAIN TOWN 

tier; people spent the day in the wine-shops, and 
the drum or the bagpipes led on the buiirrccs up to 
ten at night. Now these dancing days are over. 
" // n'y phis de jeimcsse," said Victor, the gargon. 
I hear of no great advance in what are thought 
the essentials of morality; but the bourrcc with its 
rambling', sweet, interminable music, and alert and 
rustic figures, has fallen into disuse, and is mostly 
remembered as a custom of the past. Only on 
the occasion of the fair shall you hear a drum dis- 
creetly rattling in a wine-shop or perhaps one of 
the company singing the measure while the others 
dance. I am sorry at the change, and marvel once 
more at the complicated scheme of things upon this 
earth, and how a turn of fashion in England can 
silence so much .mountain merriment in France. 
The lace-makers themselves have not entirely for- 
given our countrywomen ; and I think they take 
a special pleasure in the legend of the northern 
cjuarter of the town, called L'Anglade, because 
there the English free-lances were arrested and 
driven l>ack by the potency of a little Virgin Mary 
on the wall. 

From time to time a market is held, and the 
town has a season of revival ; cattle and pigs are 
stabled in the streets ; and pickpockets have been 
known to come all the way from Lyons for the 
occasion. Every Sunday the country folk throng 
in with daylight to buy apples, to attend mass, and 
to visit one of the wnne-shops. of which there are no 
fewer than fifty in this little town. Sunday wear 
for the men is a green tail-coat of some coarse 



I N F R A N C E 199 

sort of drugget, and usually a complete suit to 
match. I have nexer set eyes on such degrading 
raiment. Here it clings, there bulges; and the 
human Ijody, with its agreeable and lively lines, 
is turned into a mockery and laughing-stock. An- 
other piece of Sunday business with the peasants 
is to take their ailments to the chemist for advice. 
It is as much a matter for Sunday as church-going. 
I have seen a woman who had been unable to 
speak since the Monday before, wheezing, catching 
her breath, endlessly and painfully coughing; and 
yet she had waited upwards of a hundred hours 
before coming to seek help, and had the week 
been twice as long, she would have waited still. 
There was a canonical day for consultation ; such 
was the ancestral habit, to which a respectable 
lady must study to conform. 

Two conveyances go daily to Le Puy, but they 
rival each other in polite concessions rather than in 
speed. Each will wait an hour or two hours 
cheerfully while an old lady does her marketing or 
a gentleman finishes the papers in a cafe. The 
Courricr (such is the name of one) should leave 
Le Puy by two in the afternoon on the return voy- 
age, and arrive at Monastier in good time for a six 
o'clock dinner. But the driver dares not disoblige 
his customers. He will postpone his departure 
again and again, hour after hour ; and I have 
known the sun to go down on his delay. These 
purely personal favours, this consideration of 
men's fancies, rather than the hands of a me- 
chanical clock, as marking the advance of the 



200 A MOUNTAIN TOWN 

abstraction, time, makes a more humourous busi- 
ness of stage-coaching than we are used to see it. 

As far as the eye can reach, one swelHng Hne of 
hilltop rises and falls behind another; and if you 
climb an eminence, it is only to see new and farther 
ranges behind these. Many little rivers run from 
all sides in cliffy valleys ; and one of them, a few 
miles from Monastier, bears the great name of 
Loire. The mean level of the country is a little 
more than three thousand feet above the sea, which 
makes the atmosphere proportionally brisk and 
wholesome. There is little timber except pines, 
and the greater part of the country lies in moorland 
pasture. The country is wild and tumbled rather 
than commanding ; an upland rather than a moun- 
tain district ; and the most striking as well as the 
most agreeable scenery lies low beside the rivers. 
There, indeed, you will find many corners that take 
the fancy; such as made the English noble choose 
his grave by a Swiss streamlet, where Nature is at 
her freshest, and looks as young as on the seventh 
morning. Such a place is the course of the Ga- 
zeille, where it w^aters the common of Monastier 
and thence downwards till it joins the Loire; a 
place to hear birds singing ; a place for lovers to 
frequent. The name of the river was perhaps sug- 
gested by the sound of its passage over the stones ; 
for it is a great warbler, and at night, after I was 
in bed at Monastier, I could hear it go singing 
down the valley till I fell asleep. 

On the whole, this is a Scottish landscape, al- 
though not so noble as the best in Scotland ; and 



I N F R A N C E 20I 

by an odd coincidence, the population is, in its way, 
as Scottish as the country. They have abrupt, 
uncouth, Fifeshire manners, and accost you, as if 
you were trespassing, with an " Ou'st-cc que 
z'OHS al!c::;F" only translatable into the Lowland 
" Whaur ye gaun? " They keep the Scottish Sab- 
bath. There is no labour done on that day but to 
drive in and out the various pigs and sheep and 
cattle that make so pleasant a tinkling in the 
meadows. The lace-makers have disappeared from 
the street. Not to attend mass would involve 
social degradation ; and you may find people 
reading Sunday books, in particular a sort of 
Catholic Monthly Visitor on the doings of Our 
Lady of Lourdes. I remember one Sunday, when 
I was walking in the country, that I fell on a 
hamlet and found all the inhabitants, from the 
patriarch to the baby, gathered in the shadow of 
a gable at prayer. One strapping lass stood with 
her back to the wall and did the solo part, the rest 
chiming in devoutly. Not far off, a lad lay flat on 
his face asleep among some straw, to represent the 
worldly element. 

Again, this people is eager to proselytise ; and 
the postmaster's daughter used to argue with me by 
the half-hour about my heresy, until she grew quite 
flushed. I have heard the reverse process going on 
between a Scotswoman and a French girl ; and the 
arguments in the two cases were identical. Each 
apostle based her claim on the superior virtue and 
attainments of her clergy, and clenched the busi- 
ness with a threat of hell-fire. " Pes bong prcfres 



202 A MOUNTAIN TOWN 

id," said the Presbyterian, " bong prctrcs en 
Ecossc." And the postmaster's daughter, taking 
up the same weapon, phed me, so to speak, with the 
butt of it instead of the bayonet. We are a hope- 
ful race, it seems, and easily persuaded for our 
good. One cheerful circumstance I note in these 
guerilla missions, that each side relies on hell, and 
Protestant and Catholic alike address themselves 
to a supposed misgiving in their adversary's heart. 
And I call it cheerful, for faith is a more support- 
ing quality than imagination. 

Here, as in Scotland, many peasant families 
boast a son in holy orders. And here also, the 
young men ha\-e a tendency to emigrate. It is 
certainly not poverty that drives them to the great 
cities or across the seas, for many peasant families, 
I was told, have a fortune of at least 40,000 francs. 
The lads go forth pricked with the spirit of adven- 
ture and the desire to rise in life, and leave their 
homespun elders grumbling and wondering over 
the event. Once, at a village called Laussonne, I 
met one of these disappointed parents : a drake who 
had fathered a wild swan and seen it take wing and 
disappear. The wild swan in question was now 
an apothecary in Brazil. He had flown by way of 
Bordeaux, and first landed in America, bareheaded 
and barefoot, and with a single halfpenny in his 
pocket. And now he was an apothecary! Such a 
wonderful thing is an adventurous life ! I thought 
he might as well have stayed at home ; but you 
never can tell wherein a man's life consists, nor in 
what he sets his pleasure : one to drink, anotlier 



I N F R A N C E 203 

to marry, a third to write scurrilous articles and 
be repeatedly caned in public, and now this fourth, 
perhaps, to be an apothecary in Brazil. As for his 
old father, he could conceive no reason for the lad's 
behaviour. "I had always bread for him," he said; 
" he ran away to annoy me. He loved to annoy 
me. He had no gratitude." But at heart he was 
swelling with pride over his travelled offspring-, 
and he produced a letter out of his pocket, where, 
as he said, it was rotting, a mere lump of paper 
rags, and waved it gloriously in the air. " This 
comes from America," he cried, " six thousand 
leagues away ! " And the wine-shop audience 
looked upon it with a certain thrill. 

I soon became a popular figure, and was known 
for miles in the country. Oust-cc que vous allczf 
was changed for me into Quoi, vous rcntrcz au 
Monastic}' cc soir? and in the town itself every ur- 
chin seemed to know my name, although no living 
creature could pronounce it. There was one par- 
ticular group of lace-makers who brought out a 
chair for me whenever I went by, and detained 
me from my walk to gossip. They were filled 
with curiosity about England, its language, its 
religion, the dress of the w^omen, and were never 
weary of seeing the Queen's head on English 
postage-stamps or seeking for French words in 
English Journals. The language, in particular, 
filled them wdth surprise. 

" Do they speak patois in England? " I was once 
asked ; and when I told them not, " Ah, then, 
French? " said they. 



204 A MOUNTAIN TOWN 

" No, no," I said, " not French." 

" Then," they conckuled, " they speak patois." 

You must obviously either speak French or 
patois. Talk of the force of logic — here it was 
in all its weakness. I gave up the point, but pro- 
ceeding to give illustrations of my native jargon, 
I was met with a new mortification. Of all patois 
they declared that mine was the most preposterous 
and the most jocose in sound. At each new word 
there was a new explosion of laughter, and some 
of the younger ones were glad to rise from their 
chairs and stamp about the street in ecstasy; and 
I looked on upon their mirth in a faint and 
slightly disagreeable bewilderment. " Bread," 
which sounds a commonplace, plain-sailing mono- 
syllable in England, was the word that most de- 
lighted these good ladies of Monastier ; it seemed 
to them frolicsome and racy, like a page of 
Pickwick ; and they all got it carefully by heart, 
as a stand-by, I presume, for winter evenings. I 
have tried it since then wnth every sort of accent 
and inflection, but I seem to lack the sense of 
humour. 

They were of all ages : children at their first 
web of lace, a stripling girl with a bashful but en- 
couraging play of eyes, solid married women, and 
grandmothers, some on the top of their age and 
some falling towards decrepitude. One and all were 
pleasant and natural, ready to laugh and ready with 
a certain quiet solemnity when that was called for 
by the subject of our talk. Life, since tlie fall in 
wages, had begun to appear to them with a more 



I N F R A N C E 205 

serious air. The stripling girl would sometimes 
laugh at me in a provocative and not unadmiring 
manner, if I judge aright; and one of the grand- 
mothers, who was my great friend of the party, 
gave me many a sharp word of judgment on my 
sketches, my heresy, or even my arguments, and 
gave them with a wry mouth and a humourous 
twinkle in her eye that were eminently Scottish. 
But the rest used me with a certain reverence, as 
something come from afar and not entirely human. 
Nothing would put them at their ease but the irre- 
sistible gaiety of my native tongue. Between the 
old lady and myself I think there was a real attach- 
ment. She was never weary of sitting to me for 
her portrait, in her best cap and brigand hat, and 
with all her wrinkles tidily composed, and though 
she never failed to repudiate the result, she would 
always insist upon another trial. It was as good 
as a play to see her sitting in judgment over the 
last. " No, no," she would say, " that is not it. 
I am old, to be sure, but I am better-looking than 
that. We must try again." When I was about to 
leave she bade me good-bye for this life in a some- 
what touching manner. We should not meet again, 
she said ; it was a long farewell, and she was sorry. 
But life is so full of crooks, old lady, that who 
knows ? I have said good-bye to people for greater 
distances and times, and, please God, I mean to 
see them yet again. 

One thing was notable about these women, from 
the youngest to the oldest, and with hardly an ex- 
ception. In spite of their piety, they could twang 



2o6 A MOUNTAIN TOWN 

off an oath with Sir Toby Belch in person. There 
was nothing so high or so low, in heaven or earth 
or in the human body, but a woman of this neigh- 
bourhood would whip out the name of it, fair and 
square, by way of conversational adornment. My 
landlady, who was pretty and young, dressed like 
a lady and avoided patois like a weakness, com- 
monly addressed her child in the language of a 
drunken bully. And of all the swearers that I ever 
heard, commend me to an old lady in Gondet, a 
village of the Loire. I was making a sketch, and 
her curse was not yet ended when I had finished it 
and took my departure. It is true she had a right 
to be angry ; for here was her son, a hulking fel- 
low, visibly the worse for drink before the day was 
well begun. But it was strange to hear her un- 
wearying flow of oaths and obscenities, endless like 
a river, and now and then rising to a passionate 
shrillness, in the clear and silent air of the morning. 
In city slums, the thing might have passed un- 
noticed ; but in a country valley, and from a plain 
and honest countrywoman, this beastliness of speech 
surprised the ear. 

The Conductor, as he is called, of Roads and 
Bridges was my principal companion. He was 
generally intelligent, and could have spoken more 
or less falsetto on any of the trite topics ; but it 
was his specialty to ha^•e a generous taste in eat- 
ing. This was what was most indigenous in the 
man ; it was here he was an artist ; and I found in 
his company what I had long suspected, that enthu- 
siasm and special knowledge are the great social 



1 N F R A N C E 207 

qualities, and what they are about, whether white 
sauce or Shakespeare's plays, an altogether second- 
ary question. 

I used to accompany the Conductor on his pro- 
fessional rounds, and grew to believe myself an 
expert in the business. I thought I could make 
an entry in a stone-breaker's time-book, or order 
manure off the wayside with any living engineer 
in France. Gondet was one of the places we visited 
together ; and Laussonne, where I met the apothe- 
cary's father, was another. There, at Laussonne, 
George Sand spent a day while she was gathering 
materials for the Marquis dc Villcmcr; and I have 
spoken with an old man, who was then a child run- 
ning about the inn kitchen, and who still remem- 
bers her with a sort of reverence. It appears 
that he spoke French imperfectly ; for this reason 
George Sand chose him for companion, and when- 
ever he let slip a broad and picturesque phrase in 
patois, she w^ould make him repeat it again and 
again till it was graven in her memory. The 
word for a frog particularly pleased her fancy ; 
and it would be curious to know if she after- 
wards employed it in her works. The peasants, 
who knew nothing of letters and had never so 
much as heard of local colour, could not ex- 
plain her chattering with this backward child ; 
and to them she seemed a very homely lady 
and far from beautiful : the most famous man- 
killer of the age appealed so little to Velaisian 
swineherds ! 

On my first engineering excursion, which lay up 



2o8 A MOUNTAIN TOWN 

by Crouzials towards Mount Mezenc and the bor- 
ders of Ardeche, I began an improving acquaint- 
ance with the foreman road-mender. He was in 
great glee at having me with him, passed me off 
among his subalterns as the supervising engineer, 
and insisted on what he called " the gallantry " of 
paying for my breakfast in a roadside wine-shop. 
On the whole, he was a man of great weather- 
wisdom, some spirits, and a social temper. But I 
am afraid he was superstitious. When he was 
nine years old, he had seen one night a company 
of bourgeois ct dames qui fjisaient la manege aire 
des chaises, and concluded that he was in the 
presence of a witches' Sabbath. I suppose, but 
venture with timidity on the suggestion, that this 
may have been a romantic and nocturnal picnic 
party. Again, coming from Pradellcs with his 
brother, they saw a great empty cart drawn by 
six enormous horses before them on the road. 
The driver cried aloud and filled the mountains 
with the cracking of his whip. He never seemed 
to go faster than a walk, yet it was impossible 
to overtake him ; and at length, at the corner of 
a hill, the whole equipage disappeared bodily into 
the night. At the time, people said it was the 
devil qui s'amusait a faire ca. 

I suggested there was nothing more likely, as 
he must have some amusement. 

The foreman said it was odd, but there was less 
of that sort of thing than formerly. " C'est diffi- 
cile," he added, " a expliquer." 

When we were well up on the moors and the 



I N F R A N C E 209 

Conductor was trying some road-metal with the 
gauge — 

"Hark!" said the foreman, "do you hear 
nothing? " 

We hstened, and the wind, which was blowing 
chilly out of the east, brought a faint, tangled 
jangling to our ears. 

" It is the flocks of Vivarais," said he. 

For every summer, the flocks out of all Ardeche 
are brought up to pasture on these grassy plateaux. 

Here and there a little private flock was being 
tended by a girl, one spinning with a distaft', an- 
other seated on a wall and intently making lace. 
This last, when we addressed her, leaped up in a 
panic and put out her arms, like a person swim- 
ming, to keep us at a distance, and it was some 
seconds before we could persuade her of the 
honesty of our intentions. 

The Conductor told me of another herdswoman 
from whom he had once asked his road while he 
was yet new to the country, and who fled from him, 
driving her beasts before her, until he had given 
up tlie information in despair. A tale of old law- 
lessness may yet be read in these uncouth timidities. 

The winter in these uplands is a dangerous and 
melancholy time. Houses are snowed up, and way- 
farers lost in a flurry within hail of their own fire- 
side. No man ventures abroad without meat and a 
bottle of wine, which he replenishes at every wine- 
shop ; and even thus equipped he takes the road 
v/ith terror. All day the family sits about the 
fire in a foul and airless hovel, and equally without 

14 



2IO A MOUNTAIN TOWN 

work or diversion. The father may carve a rude 
piece of furniture, but that is all that will be done 
until the spring sets in again, and along with it the 
labours of the field. It is not for nothing that you 
find a clock in the meanest of these mountain 
habitations. A clock and an almanac, you would 
fancy, were indispensable in such a life. . . . 



IX 

RANDOM MEMORIES: "ROSA QUO 
LOCORUM" 



I 

THROUGH what little channels, by what 
hints and premonitions, the conscious- 
ness of the man's art dawns first upon the 
child, it should be not only interesting but instruc- 
tive to inquire. A matter of curiosity to-day, it 
will become the ground of science to-morrow. 
From the mind of childhood there is more history 
and more philosophy to be fished up than from 
all the printed volumes in a library. The child is 
conscious of an interest, not in literature, but in 
life. A taste for the precise, the adroit, or the 
comely in the use of words, comes late ; but long 
before that he has enjoyed in books a delightful 
dress-rehearsal of experience. He is first conscious 
of this material — I had almost said this practical 
— preoccupation ; it does not follow that it really 
came the first. I have some old fogged negatives 
in my collection that would seem to imply a prior 
stage. " The Lord is gone up with a shout, and 
God with the sound of a trumpet " — memorial 
version, I know not where to find the text — rings 



212 RANDOM MEMORIES 

still in my ear from my first childhood, and perhaps 
Avith something of my nurse's accent. There was 
possibly some sort of image written in my mind by 
these loud words, but I believe the words them- 
selves were what I cherished. I had about the same 
time, and under the same influence — that of my 
dear nurse — a favourite author : it is possible the 
reader has not heard of him — the Rev. Robert 
Murray M'Cheyne. My nurse and I admired his 
name exceedingly, so that I must have been taught 
the love of beautiful sounds before I was breeched ; 
and I remember two specimens of his muse until 
this day : 

" Beliind the hills o£ Naplitali 
The sun went slowly clown, 
Leaving on mountain, tower, and tree, 
A tinge of golden brown." 

There is imagery here, and I set it on one side. 
The other — it is but a verse — - not only contains 
no image, but is quite unintelligible even to my 
comparatively instructed mind, and I know not 
even how to spell the outlandish vocable that 
charmed me in my childhood : 

"Jehovah Tschidkenu is nothing to her":^ 

I may say, without flippancy, that He was nothing 
to me either, since I had no ray of a guess of what 
He was about ; yet the verse, from then to now, a 
longer interval than the life of a generation, has 
continued to haunt me. 

1 "Jehovah Tsidkenu," translated in the Authorised Version as 
"The Lord our Righteousness" (Jeremiah xxiii. 6 and xxxiii. i6). 



"ROSA QUO LOCORUM" 213 

I have said that I should set a passage distin- 
guished by obvious and pleasing imagery, however 
faint ; for the child thinks much in images, words 
are very live to him, phrases that imply a picture 
eloquent beyond their value. Rummaging in the 
dusty pigeon-holes of memory, I came once upon a 
graphic version of the famous psalm, " The Lord 
is my shepherd " : and from the places employed 
in its illustration, which are all in the immediate 
neighbourhood of a house then occupied by my 
father, I am able to date it before the seventh year 
of my age, although it was probably earlier in 
fact. The " pastures green " were represented by 
a certain suburban stubble-field, where I had once 
walked with my nurse, under an autumnal sunset, 
on the banks of the Water of Leith : the place is 
long ago built up ; no pastures now, no stubble- 
fields ; only a maze of little streets and smoking 
chimneys and shrill children. Here, in the fleecy 
person of a sheep, I seemed to myself to follow 
something unseen, unrealised, and yet benignant ; 
and close by the sheep in which I was incarnated 
— as if for greater security — rustled the skirts 
of my nurse. " Death's dark vale " was a certain 
archway in the Warriston Cemetery : a formidable 
yet beloved spot, for children love to be afraid, — 
in measure as they love all experience of vitality. 
Here I beheld myself some paces ahead (seeing 
myself, I mean, from behind), utterly alone in that 
uncanny passage : on the one side of me a rude, 
knobby shepherd's staff, such as cheers the heart 
of the cockney tourist, on the other a rod like a 



214 RANDOM MEMORIES 

billiard-cue appeared to accompany my progress : 
the staff sturdily upright, the billiard-cue inclined 
confidentially, like one whispering, towards my ear. 
I was aware — I will never tell you how — that the 
presence of these articles afforded me encourage- 
ment. The third and last of my pictures illustrated 
the words : 

" My table Thou hast furnished 
In presence of my foes : 
My head Thou dost with oil anoint, 
And my cup overflows " : 

and this was perhaps the most interesting of the 
series. I saw myself seated in a kind of open stone 
summer-house at table; over my shoulder a hairy, 
bearded, and robed presence anointed me from an 
authentic shoe-horn ; the summer-house was part 
of the green court of a ruin, and from the far side 
of the court black and white imps discharged 
against me ineffectual arrows. The picture ap- 
pears arbitrary, but I can trace every detail to its 
source, as Mr. Brock analysed the dream of Alan 
Armadale. The summer-house and court were 
muddled together out of Billings' Antiquities of 
Scotland; the imps conveyed from Bagster's Pil- 
grim's Progress; the bearded and robed figure 
from any one of a thousand Bible pictures ; and the 
shoe-horn was plagiarised from an old illustrated 
Bible, w^iere it figured in the hand of Samuel 
anointing Saul, and had been pointed out to me as a 
jest by my father. It was shown me for a jest, 
remark ; but the serious spirit of infancy adopted 



"ROSA QUO LOCORUM" 215 

it in earnest. Children are all classes ; a bottle 
would have seemed an intermediary too trivial — 
that divine refreshment of whose meaning I had no 
guess ; and I seized on the idea of that mystic shoe- 
horn with delight, even as, a little later, I should 
have written flagon, chalice, hanaper, breaker, or 
any word that might have appealed to me at the 
moment as least contaminate with mean associa- 
tions. In this string of pictures I believe the gist 
of the psalm to have consisted ; I believe it had no 
more to say to me ; and the result was consolatory. 
I would go to sleep dwelling with rest fulness upon 
these images ; they passed before me, besides,, to an 
appropriate music ; for I had already singled out 
from that rude psalm the one lovely verse which 
dwells in the minds of all, not growing old, not 
disgraced by its association with long Sunday 
tasks, a scarce conscious joy in childhood, in age a 
companion thought : 

" In pastures green Thou leadest me, 
The quiet waters by." 

The remainder of my childish recollections are 
all of the matter of what was read to me, and not of 
any manner in the words. If these pleased me, it 
was unconsciously ; I listened for news of the great 
vacant world upon whose edge I stood ; I listened 
for delightful plots that I might re-enact in play, 
and romantic scenes and circumstances that I might 
call up before me, with closed eyes, when I was 
tired of Scotland, and home, and that weary prison 
of the sick-chamber in which I lay so long in 



2i6 RANDOM MEMORIES 

durance, Robinson Crusoe; some of the books 
of that cheerful, ingenious, romantic soul, Mayne 
Reid; and a work (rather gruesome and bloody 
for a child, but very picturesque) called Paul 
Bloke; these are the three strongest impressions 
I remember : The Szuiss Family Robinson came 
next, longo intervallo. At these I played, conjured 
up their scenes, and delighted to hear them re- 
hearsed unto seventy times seven. I am not sure 
but what Paul Blake came after I could read. It 
seems connected with a visit to the country, and an 
experience unforgetable. The day had been warm ; 

H and I had played together charmingly all 

day in a sandy wilderness across the road ; then 
came the evening with a great flash of colour and a 
heavenly sweetness in the air. Somehow my play- 
mate had vanished, or is out of the story, as the 
sagas say, but I was sent into the village on an 
errand; and, taking a book of fairy tales, went 
down alone through a fir-wood, reading as I 
walked. How often since then it has befallen me 
to be happy even so ; but that was the first time : 
the shock of that pleasure I have never since forgot, 
and if my mind serves me to the last, I never shall ; 
for it was then that I knew I loved reading. 



II 

To pass from hearing literature to reading it is 
to take a great and dangerous step. With not a 
few, I think a large proportion of their pleasure 



"ROSA QUO LOCO RUM" 217 

then comes to an end ; *' the malady of not mark- 
ing " overtakes them ; they read thenceforward 
by the eye alone and hear never again the chime 
of fair words or the march of the stately period. 
Non ragioniam of these. But to all the step is dan- 
gerous ; it involves coming of age ; it is even a kind 
of second weaning. In the past all was at the choice 
of others; they chose, they digested, they read 
aloud for us and sang to their own tune the books 
of childhood. In the future we are to approach the 
silent, inexpressive type alone, like pioneers ; and 
the choice of what we are to read is in our own 
hands thenceforward. For instance, in the pas- 
sages already adduced, I detect and applaud the ear 
of my old nurse ; they were of her choice, and she 
imix)sed them on my infancy, reading the works of 
others as a poet would scarce dare to read his own ; 
gloating on the rhythm, dwelling with delight on 
assonances and alliterations. I know very well 
my mother must have been all the while trying to 
educate my taste upon more secular authors; but 
the vigour and the continual opportunities of my 
nurse triumphed, and after a long search, I can 
find in these earliest volumes of my autobiography 
no mention of anything but nursery rhymes, the 
Bible, and Mr. M'Cheyne. 

I suppose all children agree in looking back with 
delight on their school Readers. We might not 
now find so much pathos in " Bingen on the Rhine," 
" A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers," 
or in " The Soldier's Funeral," in the declaration 
of which I was held to have surpassed myself. 



2i8 RANDOM MEMORIES 

" Robert's voice," said the master on this memo- 
rable occasion, " is not strong, but impressive " : an 
opinion which I was fool enough to carry home to 
my father; who roasted me for years in conse- 
quence. I am sure one should not be so deliciously 
tickled by the humourous pieces : 

"What, crusty? cries Will, in a taking, 
Who would not be crusty with half a year's baking? " 

I think this quip would leave us cold. The " Isles 
of Greece " seem rather tawdry too ; but on the 
" Address to the Ocean," or on " The Dying Glad- 
iator," " time has writ no wrinkle." 

" 'T is the morn, but dim and dark ; 
Whither flies the silent lark? " — 

does the reader recall the moment when his eye 
first fell upon these lines in the Fourth Reader; 
and " surprised with joy, impatient as the wind," 
he plunged into the sequel ? And there was another 
piece, this time in prose, which none can have for- 
gotten ; many like me must have searched Dickens 
with zeal to find it again, and in its proper context, 
and have perhaps been conscious of some inconsid- 
erable measure of disappointment, that it was only 
Tom Pinch who drove, in such a pomp of poetry, 
to London. 

But in the Reader we are still under guides. 
What a boy turns out for himself, as he rummages 
the book-shelves, is the real test and pleasure. My 
father's library was a spot of some austerity: the 
proceedings of learned societies, some Latin divin- 



"ROSA QUO LOCORUM" 219 

ity, cyclopaedias, physical science, and, above all, 
optics, held the chief place upon the shelves, and 
it was only in holes and corners that anything 
really legible existed as by accident. The Parent's 
Assistant, Rob Roy, IV aver ley, and Guy Manner- 
ing, the Voyages of Captain Woods Rogers, Ful- 
ler's and Bunyan's Holy Wars, The Reflections of 
Robinson Crusoe, The Female Bluebeard, G. Sand's 
Mare au Diable (how came it in that grave as- 
sembly!), Ainsworth's Tozver of London, and four 
old volumes of Punch — these were the chief ex- 
ceptions. In these latter, which made for years the 
chief of my diet, I very early fell in love (almost 
as soon as I could spell) with the Snob Papers. 
I knew them almost by heart, particularly the visit 
to the Pontos ; and I remember my surprise when I 
found, long afterwards, that they were famous, and 
signed with a famous name ; to me, as I read and 
admired them, they were the works of Mr. Punch. 
Time and again I tried to read Rob Roy, with whom 
of course I w^as acquainted from the Tales of a 
Grandfather; time and again the early part, with 
Rashleigh and (think of it!) the adorable Diana, 
choked me off ; and I shall never forget the pleasure 
and surprise with which, lying on the floor one 
summer evening, I struck of a sudden into the first 
scene with Andrew Fairservice. " The worthy 
Dr. Lightfoot " — " mistrysted with a bogle " — 
" a wheen green trash " — " Jenny, lass, I think I 
ha'e her " : from that day to this the phrases have 
been unforgotten. I read on, I need scarce say ; I 
came to Glasgow, I bided tryst on Glasgow Bridge, 



220 RANDOM MEMORIES 

I met Rob Roy and the Bailie in the Tolbooth, all 
with transporting pleasure; and then the clouds 
gathered once more about my path ; and I dozed 
and skipped until I stumbled half asleep into the 
clachan of Aberfoyle, and the voices of Iverach 
and Galbraith recalled me to myself. With that 
scene and the defeat of Captain Thornton the book 
concluded ; Helen and her sons shocked even the 
little school-boy of nine or ten with their unreality; 
I read no more, or I did not grasp what I was read- 
ing ; and years elapsed before I consciously met 
Diana and her father among the hills, or saw Rash- 
leigh dying in the chair. When I think of that 
novel and that evening, I am impatient with 
all others ; they seem but shadows and impos- 
tors; they cannot satisfy the appetite which this 
awakened ; and I dare be known to think it the 
best of Sir Walter's by nearly as much as Sir 
Walter is the best of novelists. Perhaps Mr. Lang 
is right, and our first friends in the land of fiction 
are always the most real. And yet I had read 
before this Guy Manncring, and some of IVavcrlcy, 
with no such delig-hted sense of truth and humour, 
and I read immediately after the greater part of 
the Waverley Novels, and was never moved again 
in the same way or to the same degree. One cir- 
cumstance is suspicious : my critical estimate of 
the Waverley Novels has scarce changed at all 
since I w^as ten. Rob Roy, Guy Manncring, and 
Rcdgmintlct first; then, a little lower. Tlic For- 
tunes of Nigel; then, after a huge gulf, Ivanhoe 
and Anne of Geierstein: the rest nowhere; such I 



"ROSA QUO LOCORUM" 221 

was the verdict of the boy. Since then The Anti- 
quary, St. Roiian's Well, Kcuihvorth, and Tlic 
Heart of Midlothian have gone up in the scale; 
perhaps IvanJioe and Anne of Geierstein have gone 
a trifle down ; Diana Vernon has been added to my 
admirations in that enchanted world of Rob Roy; 
I think more of the letters in Red gauntlet, and 
Peter Peebles, that dreadful piece, of realism, I 
can now read about with equanimity, interest, and 
I had almost said pleasure, while to the childish 
critic he often caused unmixed distress. But the 
rest is the same ; I could not finish TJic Pirate 
when I was a child, I have never finished it yet ; 
Peveril of the Peak dropped half-way through 
from my school-boy hands, and though I have 
since waded to an end in a kind of wager with 
myself, the exercise was cjuite without enjoy- 
ment. There is something disquieting in these 
considerations. I still think the visit to Ponto's 
the best part of the Book of Snobs: does that 
mean that I was right when I was a child, or 
does it mean that I have ne\'er grown since then, 
that the child is not the man's father, but the 
man? and that I came into the world with all 
my faculties complete, and have only learned sin- 
syne to be more tolerant of boredom? . . . 



X 

THE IDEAL HOUSE 

TWO things are necessary in any neigh- 
bourhood where we propose to spend a 
Hfe : a desert and some Hving water. 
There are many parts of the earth's surface 
which offer the necessary combination of a cer- 
tain wildness with a kindly variety. A great 
prospect is desirable, but the want may be other- 
wise suppHed ; even greatness can be found on 
the small scale; for the mind and eye measure 
differently. Bold rocks near at hand are more 
inspiriting than distant Alps, and the thick fern 
upon a Surrey heath makes a fine forest for the 
imagination, and the dotted yew-trees noble moun- 
tains. A Scottish moor with birches and firs 
grouped here and there upon a knoll, or one of 
those rocky seaside deserts of Provence over- 
grown with rosemary and thyme and smoking 
with aroma, are places where the mind is never 
weary. Forests, being more enclosed, are not at 
first sight so attractive, but they exercise a spell ; 
they must, however, be diversified with either 
heath or rock, and are hardly to be considered 
perfect without conifers. Even sand-hills, with 



THE IDEAL HOUSE 223 

their intricate plan, and their gulls and rabbits, 
will stand well for the necessary desert. 

The house must be within hail of either a little 
river or the sea. A great river is more fit for 
poetry than to adorn a neighbourhood ; its sweep 
of waters increases the scale of the scenery and 
the distance of one notable object from another; 
and a lively burn gives us, in the space of a few 
yards, a greater variety of promontory and islet, 
of cascade, shallow goil, and boiling pool, with 
answerable changes both of song and colour, than 
a navigable stream in many hundred miles. The 
fish, too, make a more considerable feature of the 
brookside, and the trout plumping in the shadow 
takes the ear. A stream should, besides, be nar- 
row enough to cross, or the burn hard by a bridge, 
or we are at once shut out of Eden. The quan- 
tity of water need be of no concern, for the mind 
sets the scale, and can enjoy a Niagara Fall of 
thirty inches. Let us approve the singer of 

" Shallow rivers, by whose fall 
Melodious birds sing madrigals." 

If the sea is to be our ornamental water, choose 
an open seaboard with a heavy beat of surf; one 
much broken in outline, with small havens and 
dwarf headlands ; if possible a few islets ; and as 
a first necessity, rocks reaching out into deep 
water. Such a rock on a calm day is a better sta- 
tion than the top of Teneriffe or Chimborazo. In 
short, both for the desert and the water, the con- 
junction of many near and bold details is bold 



224 THE IDEAL HOUSE 

scenery for the imagination and keeps the mind 
ahve. 

Given these two prime luxuries, tlie nature of 
the countr}^ where we are to hve is, I had almost 
said, indifferent ; after that, inside the garden, we 
can construct a country of our own. Several old 
trees, a considerable variety of level, several well- 
grown hedges to divide our garden into provinces, 
a good extent of old well-set turf, and thickets of 
shrubs and evergreens to be cut into and cleared 
at the new owner's pleasure, are the qualities to 
be sought for in your chosen land. Nothing is 
more delightful than a succession of small lawns, 
opening one out of the other through tall hedges ; 
these have all the charm of the old bowling-green 
repeated, do not require the labour of many trim- 
mers, and afford a series of changes. You must 
have much lawn against the early summer, so as 
to have a great field of daisies, the year's morning 
frost; as you must have a wood of lilacs, to enjoy 
to the full the period of their blossoming. Haw- 
thorn is another of the spring's ingredients ; but 
it is even best to have a rough public lane at one 
side of your enclosure, which, at the right season, 
shall become an avenue of bloom and odour. The 
old flowers are the best and should grow carelessly 
in corners. Indeed, the ideal fortune is to find 
an old garden, once very richly cared for, since 
sunk into neglect, and to tend, not repair, that 
neglect ; it will thus have a smack of nature and 
wildness which skilful dispositions cannot over- 
take. The gardener should be an idler, and have 



THE IDEAL HOUSE 225 

a gross partiality to the kitchen plots; an eager 
or toilful gardener misbecomes the garden land- 
scape ; a tasteful gardener will be ever meddling, 
will keep the borders raw, and take the bloom off 
nature. Close adjoining, if you are in the south, 
an olive-yard, if in the north, a swarded apple- 
orchard reaching to the stream, completes your 
miniature domain ; but this is perhaps best en- 
tered through a door in the high fruit-wall; so 
that you close the door behind you on your sunny 
plots, your hedges and evergreen jungle, when you 
go down to watch the apples falling in the pool. 
It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for 
the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves. 
Nor must the ear be forgotten : without birds, a 
garden is a prison-yard. There is a garden near 
Marseilles on a steep hillside, walking by which, 
upon a sunny morning, your ear will suddenly be 
ra\'ished with a burst of small and very cheerful 
singing: some score of cag'es being set out there 
to sun their occupants. This is a heavenly sur- 
prise to any passer-by ; but the price paid, to keep 
so many ardent and winged creatures from their 
liberty, will make the luxury too dear for any 
thoughtful pleasure-lover. There is only one sort 
of bird that I can tolerate caged, though even then 
I think it hard, and that is what is called in France 
the Bec-d'Argent. I once had two of these pig- 
mies in captivity ; and in the quiet, bare house 
upon a silent street where I was then living, their 
song, which was not much louder than a bee's, 
but airily musical, kept me in a perpetual good- 

15 



226 THE IDEAL HOUSE 

humour. I put the cage upon my table wlien I 
worked, carried it with me when I went for meals, 
and kept it by my head at night : the first thing in 
the morning these inacstrini would pipe up. But 
these, even if you can pardon their imprisonment, 
are for the house. In the garden the wild birds 
must plant a colony, a chorus of the lesser warblers 
that should be almost deafening, a blackbird in 
the lilacs, a nightingale down the lane, so that 
you must stroll to hear it, and yet a little farther, 
tree-tops populous with rooks. 

Your house should not command much outlook ; 
it should be set deep and green, though upon ris- 
ing ground, or, if possible, crowning a knoll, for 
the sake of drainage. Yet it must be open to the 
east, or you will miss the sunrise; sunset occur- 
ring so much later, you can go up a few steps and 
look the other way. A house of more than two 
stories is a mere barrack ; indeed the ideal is of 
one storey, raised upon cellars. If the rooms are 
large, the house may be small : a single room, 
lofty, spacious, and lightsome, is more palatial than 
a castleful of cabinets and cupboards. Yet size in 
a house, and some extent and intricacy of cor- 
ridor, is certainly delightful to the flesh. The 
reception-room should be, if possible, a place ()f 
many recesses, which are " petty retiring-places 
for conference"; but it must have one long wall 
with a divan : for a day spent upon a divan, among 
a world of cushions, is as full of diversion as to 
travel. The eating-room, in the French mode, 
should be ad Jioc: unfurnished, but with a buffet. 



THE IDEAL HOUSE 227 

tlie table, necessary chairs, one or two of Cana- 
letto's etchings, and a tile fireplace for the winter. 
In neither of these public places should there be 
anything beyond a shelf or two of books ; but 
the passages may be one library from end to end, 
and the stair, if there be one, lined with volumes 
in old leather, very brightly carpeted, and leading 
half-way up, and by the way of landing, to a 
windowed recess with a fireplace; this window, 
almost alone in the house, should command a 
handsome prospect. Husband and wife must each 
possess a studio ; on the woman's sanctuary I hesi- 
tate to dwell, and turn to the man's. The walls 
are shelved waist-high for books, and the top thus 
forms a continuous table running round the wall. 
Above are prints, a large map of the neighbour- 
hood, a Corot and a Claude or two. The room 
is very spacious, and the five tables and two chairs 
are but as islands. One table is for actual work ; 
one close by for references in use ; one, very large, 
for MSS. or proofs that wait their turn; one kept 
clear for an occasion ; and the fifth is the map 
table, groaning under a collection of large-scale 
maps and charts. Of all books these are the least 
w^earisome to read and the richest in matter ; the 
course of roads and rivers, the contour-lines and 
the forests in the maps — the reefs, soundings, 
anchors, sailing-marks, and little pilot-pictures in 
the charts — and, in both, the bead-roll of names, 
make them of all printed matter the most fit to 
stimulate and satisfy the fancy. The chair in 
which you write is very low and easy, and backed 



228 THE IDE AL H O USE 

into a corner; at one elbow the fire twinkles; 
close at the other, if you are a little inhumane, 
your cage of silver-bills are twittering into 
song. 

Joined along by a passage, you may reach the 
great, sunny, glass-roofed, and tiled gymnasium, 
at the far end of which, lined with bright marble, 
is your plunge and swimming bath, fitted with a 
capacious boiler. 

The whole loft of the house from end to end 
niakes one undivided chamber; here are set forth 
tables on which to model imaginary countries in 
putty or plaster, with tools and hardy pigments; 
a carpenter's bench ; and a spared corner for 
photography, while at the far end a space is kept 
for playing soldiers. Two boxes contain the two 
armies of some five hundred horse and foot ; two 
others the ammunition of each side, and a fifth the 
foot-rules and the three colours of chalk, witli 
which you lay down, or, after a day's play, re- 
fresh the outlines of the country; red or white 
for the two kinds of road (according as they nre 
suitable or not for the passage of ordnance), and 
blue for the course of the obstructing rivers. Here 
I foresee that you may pass much happy time: 
against a good adversary a game may well con- 
tinue for a month ; for with armies so consider- 
able three moves will occupy an hour. It will be 
found to set an excellent edge on this diversion 
if one of the players shall, every day or so, write 
a report of the operations in the character of army 
corrcsDondent. 



THE IDEAL HOUSE 229 

I have left to the last the little room for winter 
evening's. This should be furnished in warm posi- 
tive colours, and sofas and floor thick with rich 
furs. The hearth, where you burn wood of aro- 
matic quality on silver dogs, tiled round with Bible 
pictures ; the seats deep and easy ; a single Titian 
in a gold frame ; a white bust or so upon a bracket ; 
a rack for the journals of the week ; a table for 
the books of the year ; and close in a corner the 
three shelves full of eternal books that never weary : 
Shakespeare, Moliere, Montaigne, Lamb, Sterne, 
De Musset's comedies (the one volume open at 
Cannosiiie and the other at Fantasia) ; the Ara- 
bian Nights, and kindred stories, in Weber's sol- 
emn volumes; Borrow's Bible in Spain, the 
Pilgrim's Progress, Gny Manncring and Rob 
Roy, Monte Crista and the Vicomte de Brage- 
lonne, immortal Boswell sole among biographers, 
Chaucer, Herrick, and the State Trials. 

The bedrooms are large, airy, with almost no 
furniture, floors of varnished wood, and at the 
bed-head, in case of insomnia, one shelf of books 
of a particular and dippable order, such as Pepys, 
the Paston Letters, Burt's Letters from the High- 
lands, or the Newgate Calendar . . . 



XI 
HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS 

THERE has come a change in medical 
opinion, and a change has followed in 
the lives of sick folk. A year or two 
ago and the wounded soldiery of mankind were 
all shut np together in some basking angle of the 
Riviera, walking a dusty promenade or sitting in 
dusty olive-yards within earshot of the intermi- 
nable and unchanging surf — idle among spiritless 
idlers ; not perhaps dying, yet hardly living either, 
and aspiring, sometimes fiercely, after livelier 
weather and some vivifying change. These were 
certainly beautiful places to live in, and the cli- 
mate was wooing in its softness. Yet there was 
a later shiver in the sunshine; you were not cer- 
tain whether you were being wooed ; and these 
mild shores would sometimes seem to you to be 
the shores of death. There was a lack of a manly 
element ; the air was not reactive ; you might write 
bits of poetry and practise resignation, but you 
did not feel that here was a good spot to repair 
your tissue or regain your nerve. And it appears, 
after all, that there was something just in these 
appreciations. The invalid is now asked to lodge 



HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS 231 

on wintry Alps ; a ruder air shall medicine him ; 
the demon of cold is no longer to be fled from, 
but bearded in his den. For even Winter has his 
" dear domestic cave," and in those places v/here 
he may be said to dwell for ever tempers his 
austerities. 

Any one who has travelled westward by the 
great transcontinental railroad of America must re- 
member tlie joy with which he perceived, after the 
tedious prairies of Nebraska and across the vast and 
dismal moorlands of Wyoming, a few snowy moun- 
tain summits along the southern sky. It is among 
these mountains in the new State of Colorado that 
the sick man may find, not merely an alleviation of 
his ailments, but the possibility of an active life and 
an honest livelihood. There, no longer as a lounger 
in a plaid, but as a working farmer, sweating at 
his work, he may prolong and begin anew his life. 
Instead of the bath chair, the spade ; instead of 
the regulated walk, rough journeys in the forest, 
and the pure, rare air of the open mountains for the 
miasma of the sick-room — these are the changes 
offered him, with what promise of pleasure and of 
self-respect, with what a revolution in all his hopes 
and terrors, none but an invalid can know. Res- 
ignation, the cowardice that apes a kind of cour- 
age and that lives in the very air of health resorts, 
is cast aside at a breath of such a prospect. The 
man can open the door; he can be up and doing; 
he can be a kind of a man after all and not merely 
an invalid. 

But it is a far cry to the Rocky Mountains. We 



232 HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS 

cannot all of us go farming in Colorado ; and there 
is yet a middle term, which combines the medical 
benefits of the new system with the moral draw- 
backs of the old. Again the invalid has to lie 
aside from life and its wholesome duties; again 
he has to be an idler among idlers; but this time 
at a great altitude, far among the mountains, with 
the snow piled before his door and the frost flowers 
every morning on his window. The mere fact is 
tonic to his nerves. His choice of a place of winter- 
ing has somehow to his own eyes the air of an act 
of bold contract; and, since he has wilfully sought 
low temperatures, he is not so apt to shudder at a 
touch of chill. He came for that, he looked for 
it, and he throws it from him with the thought. 

A long straight reach of valley, wall-like moun- 
tains upon either hand that rise higher and higher 
and shoot up new summits the higher you climb; 
a few noble peaks seen even from the valley ; a 
village of hotels ; a world of black and white — 
black pine-woods, clinging to the sides of the valley, 
and white snow flouring it, and papering it between 
the pine-woods, and covering all the mountains 
with a dazzling curd ; add a few score invalids 
marching to and fro upon the snowy road, or skat- 
ing on the ice-rinks, possibly to music, or sitting 
under sunshades by the door of the hotel — and you 
have the larger features of a mountain sanatorium. 
A certain furious river runs curving down the val- 
ley; its pace never varies, it has not a pool for as 
far as you can follow it ; and its unchanging, sense- 
less hurry is strangely tedious to witness. It is a 



HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS 233 

river that a man could grow to hate. Day after 
day breaks with the rarest gold upon the mountain 
spires, and creeps, growing and glowing, down 
into the valley. From end to end the snow re- 
verberates the sunshine; from end to end the air 
tingles with the light, clear and dry like crystal. 
Only along the course of the river, but high above 
it, there hangs far into the noon, one waving scarf 
of vapour. It were hard to fancy a more engaging 
feature in a landscape ; perhaps it is harder to 
believe that delicate, long-lasting phantom of the 
atmosphere, a creature of the incontinent stream 
whose course it follows. By noon the sky is ar- 
rayed in an unrivalled pomp of colour — mild and 
pale and melting in the north, but towards the 
zenith, dark with an intensity of purple blue. 
What with this darkness of heaven and the intoler- 
able lustre of the snow, space is reduced again to 
chaos. An English painter, coming to France late 
in life, declared with natural anger that " the 
values were all wrong." Had he got among the 
Alps on a bright day he might have lost his reason. 
And even to any one who has looked at landscape 
with any care, and in any way through the specta- 
cles of representative art, the scene has a character 
of insanity. The distant shining mountain peak 
is here beside your eyes ; the neighbouring dull- 
coloured house in comparison is miles away; the 
summit, which is all of splendid snow, is close at 
hand ; the nigh slopes, which are black with pine- 
trees, bear it no relation, and might be in another 
sphere. Here there are none of those delicate 



234 HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS 

gradations, those intimate, misty joinings-on and 
spreadings-out into the distance, nothing of that 
art of air and hght by which the face of nature 
explains and veils itself in climes which we may 
be allowed to think more lovely. A glaring piece 
of crudity, where everything that is not white is a 
solecism and defies the judgment of the eyesight; 
a scene of blinding definition ; a parade of daylight, 
almost scenically vulgar, more than scenically try- 
ing, and yet hearty and healthy, making the nerves 
to tighten and the mouth to smile: such is the 
winter daytime in the Alps. With the approach 
of evening all is changed. A mountain will sud- 
denly intercept the sun ; a shadow fall upon the 
valley ; in ten minutes the thermometer will drop 
as many degrees ; the peaks that are no longer 
shone upon dwindle into ghosts ; and meanwhile, 
overhead, if the weather be rightly characteristic 
of the place, the sky fades towards night through 
a surprising key of colours. The latest gold leaps 
from the last mountain. Soon, perhaps, the moon 
shall rise, and in her gentler light the valley shall 
be mellowed and misted, and here and there a 
wisp of silver cloud upon a hilltop, and here and 
there a warmly glowing window in a house, be- 
tween fire and starlight, kind and homely in the 
fields of snow. 

But the valley is not seated so high among the 
clouds to be eternally exempt from changes. The 
clouds gather, black as ink ; the wind bursts rudely 
in ; day after day the mists drive overhead, the 
snowflakes flutter down in blinding disarray ; daily 



HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS 235 

the mail comes in later from the top of the pass ; 
people peer through their windows and foresee no 
end but an entire seclusion from Europe, and 
death by gradual dry-rot, each in his indifferent 
inn ; and when at last the storm goes, and the sun 
comes again, behold a world of unpolluted snow, 
glossy like fur, bright like daylight, a joy to wal- 
lowing dogs and cheerful to the souls of men. Or 
perhaps from across storied and malarious Italy, a 
wind cunningly winds about the mountains and 
breaks, warm and unclean, upon our mountain 
valley. Every nerve is set ajar; the conscience 
recognises, at a gust, a load of sins and negligences 
hitherto unknown; and the whole invalid world 
huddles into its private chambers, and silently rec- 
ognises the empire of the Fohn. 



XII 
DAVOS IN WINTER 

A MOUNTAIN valley has, at the best, a cer- 
tain prison-like effect on the imagination, 
.- but a mountain valley, an Alpine winter, 
and an invalid's weakness make up among them a 
prison of the most effective kind. The roads in- 
deed are cleared, and at least one footpath dodg- 
ing up the hill ; but to these the health-seeker is 
rigidly confined. There are for him no cross-cuts 
over the field, no following of streams, no unguided 
rambles in the w-ood. His walks are cut and dry. 
In five or six different directions he can push as far, 
and no farther, than his strength permits ; never 
deviating from the line laid down for him and be- 
holding at each repetition the same field of wood 
and snow from the same corner of the road. This, 
of itself, would be a little trying to the patience in 
the course of months ; but to this is added, by the 
heaped mantle of the snow, an almost utter absence 
of detail and an almost unbroken identity of colour. 
Snow, it is true, is not merely white. The' sun 
touches it wdth roseate and golden lights. Its own 
crushed infinity of crystals, its own richness of tiny 
sculpture, fills it, when regarded near at hand, with 



DAVOS IN WINTER 237 

wonderful depths of coloured shadow, and, though 
wintrily transformed, it is still water, and has 
watery tones of blue. But, when all is said, these 
fields of white and blots of crude black forest are 
but a trite and staring substitute for the infinite 
variety and pleasantness of the earth's face. Even 
a boulder, whose front is too precipitous to have 
retained the snow, seems, if you come upon it in 
your walk, a perfect gem of colour, reminds you 
almost painfully of other places, and brings into 
your head the delights of more Arcadian days — 
the path across the meadow, the hazel dell, the lilies 
on the stream, and the scents, the colours, and the 
whisper of the woods. And scents here are as rare 
as colours. Unless you get a gust of kitchen 
in passing some hotel, you shall smell nothing all 
day long but the faint and choking odour of frost. 
Sounds, too, are absent : not a bird pipes, not a 
bough waves, in the dead, windless atmosphere. 
If a sleigh goes by, the sleigh-bells ring, and that is 
all ; you work all winter through to no other ac- 
companiment but the crunching of your steps upon 
the frozen snow. 

It is the curse of the Alpine valleys to be each 
one village from one end to the other. Go where 
you please, houses will still be in sight, before and 
behind you, and to the right and left. Climb as 
high as an invalid is able, and it is only to spy new 
habitations nested in the wood. Nor is that all ; 
for about the health resort the walks are besieged 
by single people walking rapidly with plaids about 
their shoulders, by sudden troops of German boys 



238 DAVOS IN WINTER 

trying to learn to jodel, and by German couples 
silently and, as you venture to fancy, not quite hap- 
pily, pursuing love's young dream. You may per- 
haps be an invalid who likes to make bad verses as 
he walks about. Alas ! no muse will suffer this 
imminence of interruption — and at the second 
stampede of jodellers you find your modest inspi- 
ration fled. Or you may only have a taste for 
solitude; it may try your nerves to have some one 
always in front whom you are visibly overtaking, 
and some one always behind who is audibly over- 
taking you, to say nothing of a score or so who 
brush past you in an opposite direction. It may 
annoy you to take your walks and seats in public 
view. Alas ! there is no help for it among the 
Alps. There are no recesses, as in Gorbio Valley 
by the oil-mill ; no sacred solitude of olive gardens 
on the Roccabruna road ; no nook upon St. Mar- 
tin's Cape, haunted by the voice of breakers, and 
fragrant with the threefold sweetness of the rose- 
mary and the sea-pines and the sea. 

For this publicity there is no cure, and no alle- 
viation ; but the storms of which you will complain 
so bitterly while they endure, chequer and by their 
contrast brighten the sameness of the fair-weather 
scenes. When sun and storm contend togetlier — 
when the thick clouds are broken up and pierced by 
arrows of golden daylight — there w' ill be start- 
ling rearrangements and transfigurations of the 
mountain summits. A sun-dazzling spire of alp 
hangs suspended in mid-sky among awful glooms 
and blackness; or perhaps the edge of some great 



DAVOS IN WINTER 239 

mountain shoulder will be designed in living gold, 
and appear for the duration of a glance bright like 
a constellation, and alone " in the unapparent." 
You may think you know the figure of these hills ; 
but when they are thus revealed, they belong no 
longer to the things of earth — meteors we should 
rather call them, appearances of sun and air that 
endure but for a moment and return no more. 
Other variations are more lasting, as when, for 
instance, heavy and wet snow has fallen through 
some windless hours, and the thin, spiry, mountain 
pine-trees stand each stock-still and loaded with a 
shining burthen. You may drive through a forest 
so disguised, the tongue-tied torrent struggling 
silently in the cleft of the ravine, and all still ex- 
cept the jingle of the sleigh bells, and you shall 
fancy yourself in some untrodden northern terri- 
tory — Lapland, Labrador, or Alaska. 

Or, possibly, you arise very early in the morn- 
ing; totter down-stairs in a state of somnambu- 
lism ; take the simulacrum of a meal by the 
glimmer of one lamp in the deserted coffee-room ; 
and find yourself by seven o'clock outside in a 
belated moonlight and a freezing chill. The mail 
sleigh takes you up and carries you on, and you 
reach the top of the ascent in the first hour of the 
day. To trace the fires of the sunrise as they pass 
from peak to peak, to see the unlit tree-tops stand 
out soberly against the lighted sky, to be for twenty 
minutes in a wonderland of clear, fading shadows, 
disappearing vapours, solemn blooms of dawn, hills 
half glorified already with the day and still half 



240 DAVOS IN WINTER 

confounded with the greyness of the western heaven 
— these will seem to repay you for the discom- 
forts of that early start ; but as the hour proceeds, 
and these enchantments vanish, you will find your- 
self upon the farther side in yet another Alpine 
valley, snow white and coal black, with such an- 
other long-drawn congeries of hamlets and such 
another senseless water-course bickering along the 
foot. You have had your moment ; but you have 
not changed the scene. The mountains are about 
you like a trap ; you cannot foot it up a hillside and 
behold the sea as a great plain, but live in holes and 
corners, and can change only one for another. 



XIII 
ALPINE DIVERSIONS 

THERE will be no lack of diversion in 
an Alpine sanatorium. The place is half 
English, to be sure, the -local sheet appear- 
ing in double column, text and translation ; but it 
still remains half German; and hence we have a 
band which is able to play, and a company of actors 
able, as you will be told, to act. This last you 
will take on trust, for the players, unlike the local 
sheet, confine themselves to German ; and though 
at the beginning of winter they come with their 
wig-boxes to each hotel in turn, long before 
Christmas they will have given up the English for 
a bad job. There will follow, perhaps, a skirmish 
between the two races : the German element seek- 
ing, in the interest of their actors, to raise a mys- 
terious item, the Kiir-taxc, which figures heavily 
enough already in the weekly bills ; the English ele- 
ment stoutly resisting. Meantime in the English 
hotels home-played farces, t able aux-vw ants, and 
even balls enliven the evenings ; a charity bazaar 
sheds genial consternation ; Christmas and New 
Year are solemnised with Pantagruelian dinners, 
and from time to time the young folks carol and 

i6 



242 ALPINE DIVERSIONS 

revolve imtnnefully enough through the figures 
of a singing quadrihe. A magazine chib suppHes 
you with everything, from the Quarterly to the 
Sunday at Home. Grand tournaments are organ- 
ised at chess, draughts, bilhards, and whist. Once 
and again wandering artists drop into our moun- 
tain valley, coming you know not whence, going 
you cannot imagine whither, and belonging to every 
degree in the hierarchy of musical art, from the 
recognised performer who announces a concert for 
the evening, to the comic German family or soli- 
tary long-haired German baritone, who surprises 
the guests at dinner-time with songs and a collec- 
tion. They are all of them good to see ; they, at 
least, are moving; they bring with them the senti- 
ment of the open road ; yesterday, perhaps, they 
were in Tyrol, and next week they will be far in 
Lombardy, while all we sick folk still simmer in 
our mountain prison. Some of them, too, are wel- 
come as the flowers in May for their own sake ; 
some of them may have a human voice ; some may 
have that magic which transforms a wooden box 
into a song-bird, and what we jeeringly call a fiddle 
into what we mention with respect as a violin. 
From that grinding lilt, with which the blind man, 
seeking pence, accompanies the beat of paddle 
wheels across the ferry, there is surely a differ- 
ence rather of kind than of degree to that unearthly 
voice of singing that bewails and praises the des- 
tiny of man at the touch of the true virtuoso. Even 
that you may perhaps enjoy; and if you do so 
you will own it impossible to enjoy it more keenly 



ALPINE DIVERSIONS 243 

than here, ini Sclincc der Alpcn. A hyacinth in 
a pot, a handful of primroses packed in moss, or 
a piece of music by some one who knows the way 
to the heart of a viohn, are things that, in this in- 
variable sameness of the snows and frosty air, sur- 
prise you like an adventure. It is droll, moreover, 
to compare the respect with which the invalids 
attend a concert, and the ready contempt with 
which they greet the dinner-time performers. 
Singing- which they would hear with real enthu- 
siasm — possibly with tears — from a corner of a 
drawing-room, is listened to with laughter when 
it is offered by an unknown professional and no 
money has been taken at the door. 

Of skating little need be said ; in so snowy a 
climate the rinks must be intelligently maiiaged ; 
their mismanagement will lead to many days of 
vexation and some petty cjuarrciling, but when all 
goes well, it is certainly curious, and perhaps rather 
unsafe, for the invalid to skate under a burning 
sun, and walk back to his hotel in a sweat, through 
long tracts of glare and passages of freezing 
shadow. But the peculiar outdoor sport of this 
district is tobogganing. A Scotchman may re- 
member the low flat board, with the front wheels 
on a pivot, which was called a hurJic; he may re- 
niember this contrivance, laden with boys, as, labo- 
riously started, it ran rattling down the brae, and 
was, now successfully, now unsuccessfully, steered 
round the corner at the foot ; he may remember 
scented summer evenings passed in this diversion, 
and many a grazed skin, bloody cockscomb, and 



244 ALPINE DIVERSIONS 

neglected lesson. The toboggan is to the hiirlie 
what the sled is to the carriage ; it is a hurlie upon 
runners; and if for a grating road you substitute 
a long declivity of beaten snow, you can imagine 
the giddy career of the tobogganist. The correct 
position is to sit; but the fantastic will sometimes 
sit hindforemost, or dare the descent upon their 
belly or their back. A few steer with a pair of 
pointed sticks, but it is more classical to use the 
feet. If the weight be heavy and the track smooth, 
the toboggan takes the bit between its teeth ; and to 
steer a couple of full-sized friends in safety requires 
not only judgment but desperate exertion. On a 
very steep track, with a keen evening frost, you 
may have moments almost too appalling to be 
called enjoyment ; the head goes, the world van- 
ishes ; your blind steed bounds below your weight ; 
you reach the foot, with all the breath knocked out 
of your body, jarred and bewildered as though 
you had just been subjected to a railway accident. 
Another element of joyful horror is added by the 
formation of a train; one toboggan being tied 
to another, perhaps to the number of half a dozen, 
only the first rider being allowed to steer, and all 
the rest pledged to put up their feet and follow their 
leader, with heart in mouth, down the mad de- 
scent. This, particularly if the track begins with a 
headlong plunge, is one of the most exhilarating 
follies in the world, and the tobogganing invalid 
is early reconciled to somersaults. 

There is all manner of variety in the nature of 
the tracks, some miles in length, others but a few 



ALPINE DIVERSIONS 245 

yards, and yet, like some short rivers, furious in 
their brevity. AU degrees of skiU and courage and 
taste may be suited in your neighbourhood. But 
perhaps the true way to toboggan is alone and at 
night. First comes the tedious climb, dragging your 
instrument behind you. Next a long breathing- 
space, alone with snow and pine woods, cold, 
silent, and solemn to the heart. Then you push 
off ; the toboggan fetches way ; she begins to feel 
the hill, to glide, to swim, to gallop. In a breath 
you are out from under the pine-trees, and a whole 
heavenful of stars reels and flashes overhead. Then 
comes a vicious effort ; for by this time your 
wooden steed is speeding like the wind, and you 
are spinning round a corner, and the whole glitter- 
ing valley and all the lights in all the great hotels 
lie for a moment at your feet ; and the next you are 
racing once more in the shadow of the night with 
close-shut teeth and beating heart. Yet a little 
while and you will be landed on the highroad by 
the door of your own hotel. This, in an atmos- 
phere tingling with forty degrees of frost, in a 
night made luminous with stars and snow, and girt 
with strange white mountains, teaches the pulse an 
unaccustomed tune and adds a new excitement to 
the life of man upon his planet. 



XIV 
THE STIMULATION OF THE ALPS 

TO any one who should come from a 
southern sanatorium to the Alps, the row 
of sunburned faces round the table would 
present the first surprise. He would begin by look- 
ing for the invalids, and he would lose his pains, 
for not one out of five of even the bad cases bears 
the mark of sickness on his face. The plump sun- 
shine from above and its strong reverberation from 
below colour the skin like an Indian climate ; the 
treatment, which consists mainly of the open air, 
exposes even the sickliest to tan, and a tableful of 
invalids comes, in a month or two, to resemble a 
tableful of hunters. But although he may be thus 
surprised at the first glance, his astonishment will 
grow greater, as he experiences the effects of the 
climate on himself. In many ways it is a trying 
business to reside upon the Alps : the stomach is 
exercised, the appetite often languishes; the liver 
may at times rebel ; and because you have come 
so far from metropolitan advantages, it does not 
follow that you shall recover. But one thing is 
undeniable — that in the rare air, clear, cold, and 
blinding light of Alpine winters, a man takes a 
certain troubled delisrht in his existence which can 



THE ALPS 247 

nowhere else be paralleled. He is perhaps no hap- 
pier, but he is sting-ingly alive. It does not, per- 
haps, come out of him in work or exercise, yet he 
feels an enthusiasm of the blood unknown in more 
temperate climates. It may not be health, but it is 
fun. 

There is nothing more difficult to communicate 
on paper than this baseless ardour, this stimula- 
tion of the brain, this sterile joyousness of spirits. 
You wake every morning', see the gold upon the 
snow-peaks, become filled with courage, and bless 
God for your prolonged existence. The valleys 
are but a stride to you ; you cast your shoe over 
the hilltops ; your ears and your heart sing ; in the 
words of an unverified quotation from the Scotch 
psalms, you feel yourself fit " on the wings of all the 
winds " to " come flying all abroad." Europe and 
your mind are too narrow for that flood of energy. 
Yet it is notable that you are hard to root out of 
your bed ; that you start forth, singing, indeed, on 
your walk, yet are unusually ready to turn home 
again; that the best of you is volatile; and that 
although the restlessness remains till night, the 
strength is early at an end. With all these heady 
jollities, you are half conscious of an underlying 
languor in the body ; you prove not to be so well as 
you had fancied ; you weary before you have well 
begun ; and though you mount at morning with 
the lark, that is not precisely a song-bird's heart 
that you bring back with you when you return 
with aching limbs and peevish temper to your inn. 

It is hard to say wherein it lies, but this joy of 



248 THE STIMULATION 

Alpine winters is its own reward. Baseless, in 
a sense, it is more than worth more permanent im- 
provements. The dream of health is perfect while 
it lasts ; and if, in trying to realise it, you speedily 
wear out the dear hallucination, still every day, 
and many times a day, you are conscious of a 
strength you scarce possess, and a delight in living 
as merry as it proves to be transient. 

The brightness — heaven and earth conspiring 
to be bright — the levity and quiet of the air ; the 
odd stirring silence — more stirring than a tumult ; 
the snow, the frost, the enchanted landscape : all 
have their part in the effect and on the memory, 
" tous vons tapent siir la tcte " ; and yet when you 
have enumerated all, you have gone no nearer to 
explain or even to qualify the delicate exhilaration 
that you feel — delicate, you may say, and yet 
excessive, greater than can be said in prose, almost 
greater than an invalid can bear. There is a cer- 
tain wine of France known in England in some 
gaseous disguise, but when drunk in the land of its 
nativity still as a pool, clean as river water, and as 
heady as verse. It is more than probable that 
in its noble natural condition this was the very 
wine of Anjou so beloved by Athos in the Mus- 
keteers. Now, if the reader has ever washed down 
a liberal second breakfast with the wine in ques- 
tion, and gone forth, on the back of these dilutions, 
into a sultry, sparkling noontide, he will have felt 
an influence almost as genial, although strangely 
grosser, than this fairy titillation of the nerves 
among the snow and sunshine of the Alps. That 



O F T H E A L P S 249 

also is a mode, we need not say of intoxication, but 
of insobriety. Thus also a man walks in a strong- 
sunshine of the mind, and follows smiling, insub- 
stantial meditations. And whether he be really so 
clever or so strong as he supposes, in either case 
he will enjoy his chimera while it lasts. 

The influence of this giddy air displays itself in 
many secondary ways. A certain sort of laboured 
pleasantry has already been recognised, and may 
perhaps have been remarked in these papers, as a 
sort peculiar to that climate. People utter their 
judgments with a cannonade of syllables ; a big 
word is as good as a meal to them ; and the turn 
of a phrase goes further than humour or wisdom. 
By the professional writer many sad vicissitudes 
have to be undergone. At first he cannot write at 
all. The heart, it appears, is unequal to the pres- 
sure of business, and the brain, left without nourish- 
ment, goes into a mild decline. Next, some power 
of work returns to him, accompanied by jumping 
headaches. Last, the spring is opened, and there 
pours at once from his pen a world of blatant, 
hustling polysyllables, and talk so high as, in the old 
joke, to be positively offensive in hot weather. Pie 
writes it in good faith and with a sense of inspira- 
tion ; it is only when he comes to read what he has 
written that surprise and disquiet seize upon his 
mind. What is he to do, poor man? All his little 
fishes talk like whales. . This yeasty inflation, this 
stiff and strutting architecture of the sentence has 
come upon him while he slept ; and it is not he, it is 
the Alps, who are to blame. He is not. perhaps. 



250 THE ALPS 

alone, which somewhat comforts him. Nor is the ill 
without a remedy. Some day, when the spring re- 
turns, he shall go down a little lower in this world, 
and remember quieter inflections and more modest 
language. But here, in the meantime, there seems 
to swim up some outline of a new cerebral hygiene 
and a good time coming, when experienced advisers 
shall send a man to the proper measured level for 
the ode, the biography, or the religious tract ; and a 
nook may be found between the sea and Chimborazo, 
where Mr. Swinburne shall be able to write more 
continently, and Mr. Browning somewhat slower. 

Is it a return of youth, or is it a congestion of 
the brain ? It is a sort of congestion, perhaps, that 
leads the invalid, when all goes well, to face the 
new day with such a bubbling cheerfulness. It 
is certainly congestion that makes night hideous 
with visions, all the chambers of a many-storeyed 
caravanserai, haunted with vociferous nightmares, 
and many wakeful people come down late for break- 
fast in the morning. Upon that theory the cynic 
may explain the whole affair — exhilaration, night- 
mares, pomp of tongue and all. But, on the other 
liand, the peculiar blessedness of boyhood may 
itself be but a symptom of the same complaint, for 
the two effects are strangely similar ; and the frame 
of mind of the invalid upon the Alps is a sort of 
intermittent youth, with periods of lassitude. The 
fountain of Juventus does not play steadily in these 
parts ; but there it plays, and possibly nowhere else. 



ESSAYS IN THE ART OF 
WRITING 



I 

ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS 
OF STYLE IN LITERATURE 

THERE is nothing more disenchanting to 
man than to be shown the springs and 
mechanism of any art. All our arts and 
occupations lie wholly on the surface ; it is on the 
surface that we perceive their beauty, fitness, and 
significance; and to pry below is to be appalled 
by their emptiness and shocked by the coarseness 
of the strings and pulleys. In a similar way, psy- 
chology itself, when pushed to any nicety, dis- 
covers an abhorrent baldness, but rather from the 
fault of our analysis than from any poverty native 
to the mind. * And perhaps in aesthetics the reason is 
the same: those disclosures which seem fatal to the 
dignity of art seem so perhaps only in the propor- 
tion of our ignorance ; and those conscious and 
unconscious artifices which it seems unworthy of the 
serious artist to employ were yet, if we had the 
power to trace them to their springs, indications of 
a delicacy of the sense finer than we conceive, and 
hints of ancient harmonies in nature. This igno- 
rance at least is largely irremediable. We shall 
never leatn the affinities of beauty, for they lie too 



254 TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF 

deep in nature and too far back in the mysterious 
history of man. The amateur, in consequence, 
will always grudgingly receive details of method, 
which can be stated but never can wholly be 
explained ; nay, on the principle laid down in 
Hudibras, that 

" Still the less they understand, 
The more they admire the sleight-of-hand," 

many are conscious at each new disclosure of a 
diminution in the ardour of their pleasure. I must 
therefore warn that well-known character, the 
general reader, that I am here embarked upon a 
most distasteful business : taking down the pic- 
ture from the wall and looking on the back ; and, 
like the inquiring child, pulling the musical cart to 
pieces. 

I. Choice of Words. — The art of literature 
stands apart from among its sisters, because the 
material in which the literary artist works is the 
dialect of life; hence, on the one hand, a strange 
freshness and immicdiacy of address to the public 
mind, which is ready prepared to understand it; 
but hence, on the other, a singular limitation. The 
sister arts enjoy the use of a plastic and ductile 
material, like the modeller's clay ; literature alone is 
condemned to work in mosaic with finite and quite 
rigid words. You have seen these blocks, dear to 
the nursery: this one a pillar, that a pediment, 
a third a window or a vase. It is with blocks of 
just such arbitrary size and figure that the literary 
architect is condemned to desien the palace of his 



STYLE IN LITERATURE 255 

art. Nor is this all ; for since these blocks, or 
words, are the acknowledged currency of our 
daily affairs, there are here possible none of those 
suppressions by which other arts obtain relief, 
continuity, and vigour : no hieroglyphic touch, no 
smoothed impasto, no inscrutable shadow, as in 
painting; no blank wall, as in architecture; but 
every word, phrase, sentence, and paragraph must 
move in a logical progression, and convey a defi- 
nite conventional import. 

Now the first merit which attracts in the pages of 
a good writer, or the talk of a brilliant conversa- 
tionalist, is the apt choice and contrast of the words 
employed. It is, indeed, a strange art to take these 
blocks, rudely conceived for the purpose of the 
market or the bar, and by tact of application touch 
them to the finest meanings and distinctions, restore 
to them their primal energy, wittily shift them to 
another issue, or make of them a drum to rouse the 
passions. But though this form of merit is with- 
out doubt the most sensible and seizing, it is far 
from being equally present in all writers. The 
effect of words in Shakespeare, their singular 
justice, significance, and poetic charm, is different, 
indeed, from the effect of words in Addison or 
Fielding. Or, to take an example nearer home, the 
words in C^rlyle seem electrified into an energy of 
lineament, like the faces of men furiously moved; 
whilst the words in Macaulay, apt enough to con- 
vey his meaning, harmonious enough in sound, yet 
glide from the memory like undistinguished ele- 
ments in a general effect. But the first class of 



256 TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF 

writers have no monopoly of literary merit. There 
is a sense in which Addison is superior to Carlyle ; 
a sense in which Cicero is better than Tacitus, in 
which Voltaire excels Montaigne : it certainly lies 
not in the choice of words ; it lies not in the 
interest or value of the matter; it lies not in 
force of intellect, of poetry, or of humour. The 
three first are but infants to the three second; 
and yet each, in a particular point of literary art, 
excels his superior in the whole. What is that 
point ? 

2. The Web. — Literature, although it stands 
apart by reason of the great destiny and general 
use of its medium in the affairs of men, is yet an 
art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish 
two great classes : those arts, like sculpture, paint- 
ing, acting, which are representative, or, as used 
to be said very clumsily, imitative; and those, 
like architecture, music, and the dance, which are 
self-sufficient, and merely presentative. Each 
class, in right of this distinction, obeys principles 
apart ; yet both may claim a common ground of ex- 
istence, and it may be said with sufficient justice 
that the motive and end of any art whatever is to 
make a pattern; a pattern,, it may be, of colours, 
of sounds, of changing attitudes, geometrical fig- 
ures, or imitative lines ; but still a pattern. That is 
the plane on which these sisters meet ; it is by this 
that they are arts ; and if it be well they should 
at times forget their childish origin, addressing 
their intelligence to virile tasks, and performing 
unconsciously that necessary function of their life, 



STYLE IN LITERATURE 257 

to make a pattern, it is still imperative that the pat- 
tern shall be made. 

Music and literature, the two temporal arts, con- 
trive their pattern of sounds in time; or, in other 
words, of sounds and pauses. Communication 
may be made in broken words, the business of life 
be carried on with substantives alone; but that is 
not what we call literature; and the true business 
of the literary artist is to plait or weave his mean- 
ing, involving it around itself ; so that each sen- 
tence, by successive phrases, shall first come into 
a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of sus- 
pended meaning, solve and clear itself. In every 
properly constructed sentence there should be ob- 
served this knot or hitch; so that (however deli- 
cately) we are led to foresee, to expect, and then 
to welcome the successive phrases. The pleasure 
may be heightened by an element of surprise, as, 
very grossly, in the common figure of the antith- 
esis, or, with much greater subtlety, where an 
antithesis is first suggested and then deftly evaded. 
Each phrase, besides, is to be comely in itself ; and 
between the implication and the evolution of the 
sentence there should be a satisfying equipoise of 
sound ; for nothing more often disappoints the ear 
than a sentence solemnly and sonorously prepared, 
and hastily and weakly finished. Nor should the 
balance be too striking and exact, for the one rule 
is to be infinitely various ; to interest, to disap- 
point, to surprise, and yet still to gratify ; to be ever 
changing, as it were, the stitch, and yet still to give 
the effect of an ingenious neatness. 

17 



258 TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF 

The conjurer juggles with two oranges, and 
our pleasure in beholding him springs from this, 
that neither is for an instant overlooked or sacri- 
ficed. So with the writer. His pattern, which is 
to please the supersensual ear, is yet addressed, 
throughout and first of all, to the demands of 
logic. Whatever be the obscurities, whatever the 
intricacies of the argument, the neatness of the 
fabric must not suffer, or the artist has been proved 
unequal to his design. And, on the other hand, no 
form of words must be selected, no knot must be 
tied among the phrases, unless knot and word 
be precisely what is wanted to forward and illumi- 
nate the argument ; for to fail in this is to swindle 
in the game. The genius of prose rejects the 
cheville no less emphatically than the laws of verse ; 
and the cJicz'illc, I should perhaps explain to some 
of my readers, is any meaningless or very watered 
phrase employed to strike a balance in the sound. 
Pattern and argument live in each other; and it 
is by the brevity, clearness, charm, or emphasis 
of the second, that we judge the strength and fit- 
ness of the first. 

Style is synthetic ; and the artist, seeking, so to 
speak, a peg to plait about, takes up at once two or 
more elements or two or more views of the sub- 
ject in hand ; combines, implicates, and contrasts 
them ; and while, in one sense, he was merely seek- 
ing an occasion for the necessary knot, he will be 
found, in the other, to have greatly enriched the 
meaning, or to have transacted the work of two 
sentences in the space of one. In the change from 



STYLE IN LITERATURE 259 

the successive shallow statements of the old chron- 
icler to the dense and luminous flow of highly 
synthetic narrative, there is implied a vast amount 
of both philosophy and wit. The philosophy we 
clearly see, recognising in the synthetic writer a 
far more deep and stimulating view of life, and 
a far keener sense of the generation and afiinity of 
events. The wit we might imagine to be lost ; but 
it is not so, for it is just that wit, these perpetual 
nice contrivances, these difficulties overcome, this 
double purpose attained, these two oranges kept 
simultaneously dancing in the air, that, consciously 
or not, afford the reader his delight. Nay, and this 
wit, so little recognised, is the necessary organ of 
that philosophy which we so much admire. That 
style is therefore the most perfect, not, as fools 
say, which is the most natural, for the most natural 
is the disjointed babble of the chronicler ; but 
which attains the highest degree of elegant and 
pregnant implication unobtrusively ; or if obtru- 
sively, then with the greatest gain to sense and 
vigour. Even the derangement of the phrases 
from their (so-called) natural order is luminous 
for the mind ; and it is by the means of such de- 
signed reversal that the elements of a judgment 
may be most pertinently marshalled, or the stages 
of a complicated action most perspicuously bound 
into one. 

The web, then, or the pattern : a web at once 
sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant tex- 
ture : that is style, that is the foundation of the art 
of literature. Books indeed continue to be read. 



26o TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF 

for the interest of the fact or fable, in which this 
qiiahty is poorly represented, but still it will be 
there. And, on the other hand, how many do we 
continue to peruse and reperuse with pleasure 
whose only merit is the elegance of texture? I am 
tempted to mention Cicero; and since Mr. An- 
thony Trollope is dead, I will. It is a poor diet for 
the mind, a very colourless and toothless " criticism 
of life " ; but we enjoy the pleasure of a most in- 
tricate and dexterous pattern, every stitch a model 
at once of elegance and of good sense; and the 
two oranges, even if one of them be rotten, kept 
dancing with inimitable grace. 

Up to this moment I have had my eye mainly 
upon prose; for though in verse also the implica- 
tion of the logical texture is a crowning beauty, 
yet in verse it may be dispensed with. You would 
think that here was a death-blow to all I have been 
saying ; and far from that, it is but a new illustra- 
tion of the principle involved. For if the versifier 
is not bound to weave a pattern of his own, it is 
because another pattern has been formally imposed 
upon him by the laws of verse. For that is the 
essence of a prosody. Verse may be rhythmical ; 
it may be merely alliterative ; it may, like the 
French, depend wholly on the (quasi) regular re- 
currence of the rhyme ; or, like the Hebrew, it may 
consist in the strangely fanciful device of repeating 
the same idea. It does not matter on what prin- 
ciple the law is based, so it be a law. It may be 
pure convention ; it may have no inherent beauty ; 
all that we have a right to ask of any prosody is, 



STYLE IN LITERATURE 261 

that it shall lay down a pattern for the writer, and 
that what it lays down shall be neither too easy nor 
too hard. Hence it comes that it is much easier for 
men of equal facility to write fairly pleasing verse 
than reasonably interesting prose; for in prose the 
pattern itself has to be invented, and the difficulties 
first created before they can be solved. Hence, 
again, there follows the peculiar greatness of the 
true versifier : such as Shakespeare, Milton, and 
Victor Hugo, whom I place beside them as versifier 
merely, not as poet. These not only knit and knot 
the logical texture of the style with all the dexterity 
and strength of prose ; they not only fill up the pat- 
tern of the verse with infinite variety and sober wit ; 
but they give us, besides, a rare and special pleasure, 
by the art, comparable to that of counterpoint, with 
which they follow at the same time, and now con- 
trast, and now combine, the double pattern of the 
texture and the verse. Here the sounding line 
concludes ; a little further on, the well-knit sen- 
tence ; and yet a little further, and both will reach 
their solution on the same ringing syllable. The 
best that can be offered by the best writer of 
prose is to show us the development of the idea 
and the stylistic pattern proceed hand in hand, 
sometimes by an obvious and triumphant- effort, 
sometimes with a great air of ease and nature. 
The writer of verse, by virtue of conquering another 
difficulty, delights us with a new series of triumphs. 
He follows three purposes where his rival followed 
only two ; and the change is of precisely the same 
nature as that from melody to harmony. Or 



262 TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF 

if you prefer to return to the juggler, behold 
him now, to the vastly increased enthusiasm of the 
spectators, juggling with three oranges instead of 
two. Thus it is : added difficulty, added beauty ; 
and the pattern, with every fresh element, becom- 
ing more interesting in itself. 

Yet it must not be thought that verse is simply 
an addition ; something is lost as well as something 
gained; and there remains plainly traceable, in 
comparing the best prose with the best verse, a 
certain broad distinction of method in the web. 
Tight as the versifier may draw the knot of logic, 
yet for the ear he still leaves the tissue of the sen- 
tence floating somewhat loose. In prose, the sen- 
tence turns upon a pivot, nicely balanced, and fits 
into itself with an obtrusive neatness like a puzzle. 
The ear remarks and is singly gratified by this 
return and balance ; while in verse it is all diverted 
to the measure. To find comparable passages is 
hard ; for either the versifier is hugely the superior 
of the rival, or, if he be not, and still persist in his 
more delicate enterprise, he fails" to be as widely 
his inferior. But let us select them from the pages 
of the same writer, one who was ambidexter ; let 
us take, for instance. Rumour's Prologue to the 
Second Part of Henry IV., a fine flourish of elo- 
quence in Shakespeare's second manner, and set it 
side by side with Falstaff's praise of sherris, act iv. 
scene i. ; or let us compare the beautiful prose 
spoken throughout by Rosalind and Orlando ; 
compare, for example, the first speech of all, Orlan- 
do's speech to Adam, with what passage it shall 



STYLE IN LITERATURE 263 

please you to select — the Seven Ages from the 
same play, or even such a stave of nobility as 
Othello's farewell to war; and still you will be 
able to perceive, if you have an ear for that class 
of music, a certain superior degree of organisation 
in the prose ; a compacter fitting of the parts ; a 
balance in the swing and the return as of a throb- 
bing pendulum. We must not, in things temporal, 
take from those who have little, the little that they 
have ; the merits of prose are inferior, but they 
are not the same; it is a little kingdom, but an 
independent. 

3. Rhythm of the Phrase. — Some way back, I 
used a word which still awaits an application. 
Each phrase, I said, was to be comely ; but what is 
a comely phrase? In all ideal and material points, 
literature, being a representative art, must look for 
analogies to painting and the like; but in what is 
technical and executive, being a temporal art, it 
must seek for them in music. Each phrase of each 
sentence, like an air or a recitative in music, should 
be so artfully compounded out of long and short, 
out of accented and unaccented, as to gratify the 
sensual ear. And of this the ear is the sole judge. 
It is impossible to lay down laws. Even in our 
accentual and rhythmic language no analysis can 
find the secret of the beauty of a verse ; how much 
less, then, of those phrases, such as prose is built of, 
which obey no law but to be lawless and yet to 
please? The little that we know of verse (and 
for my part I owe it all to my friend Professor 
Fleeming Jenkin) is, however, particularly inter- 



264 TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF 

esting in the present connection. We have been 
accustomed to describe the heroic hne as five 
iambic feet, and to be filled with pain and 
confusion whenever, as by the conscientious school- 
boy, we have heard our own description put in 
practice. 

" All night I the drekd | less kn | gel un | pursued," ^ 

goes the school-boy ; but though we close our ears, 
we cling to our definition, in spite of its proved and 
naked insufficiency. Mr. Jenkin was not so easily 
pleased, and readily discovered that the heroic line 
consists of four groups, or, if you prefer the phrase, 
contains four pauses : 

"All night I the dreadless | angel | unpursued." 

Four groups, each practically uttered as one word : 
the first, in this case, an iamb ; the second, an am- 
phibrachys; the third, a trochee; and the fourth, 
an amphimacer; and yet our school-boy, with no 
other liberty but that of inflicting pain, had trium- 
phantly scanned it as five iambs. Perceive, now, 
this fresh richness of intricacy in the web; this 
fourth orange, hitherto unremarked, but still kept 
flying with the others.. What had seemed to be one 
thing it noAV appears is two ; and, like some puzzle 
in arithmetic, the verse is made at the same time to 
read in fives and to read in fours. 

But, again, four is not necessary. We do not, in- 
deed, find verses in six groups, because there is not 
room for six in the ten syllables; and we do not 

1 Milton. 



STYLE IN LITERATURE 265 

find verses of two, because one of the main dis- 
tinctions of verse from prose resides in the com- 
parative shortness of the group ; but it is even 
common to find verses of three. Five is the one 
forbidden number; because five is the number of 
the feet ; and if five were chosen, the two pat- 
terns would coincide, and that opposition which 
is the Hfe of verse would instantly be lost. We 
have here a clue to the effect of polysyllables, 
above all in Latin, where they are so common 
and make so brave an architecture in the verse ; 
for the polysyllable is a group of Nature's mak- 
ing. If but some Roman would return from 
Hades (Martial, for choice), and tell me by what 
conduct of the voice these thundering verses should 
be uttered — ''Ant Laccdccmoniuin Tarentum," for 
a case in point — I feel as if I should enter at 
last into the full enjoyment of the best of human 
verses. 

But, again, the five feet are all iambic, or sup- 
posed to be ; by the mere count of syllables the four 
groups cannot be all iambic; as a question of ele- 
gance, I doubt if any one of them requires to be so ; 
and I am certain that for choice no two of them 
should scan the same. The singular beauty of the 
verse analysed above is due, so far as analysis can 
carry us, part, indeed, to the clever repetition of 
L, D, and N, but part to this variety of scansion 
in the groups. The groups which, like the bar in 
music, break up the verse for utterance, fall uniam- 
bically ; and in declaiming a so-called iambic verse, 
it may so happen that we never utter one iambic 



266 TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF 

foot. And yet to this neglect of the original beat 
there is a limit. 

"Athens, tlie eye of Greece, mother of arts,"^ 

is, with all its eccentricities, a good heroic line; 
for though it scarcely can be said to indicate the 
Ijeat of the iamb, it certainly suggests no other 
measure to the ear. But begin 

" Mother Athens, eye of Greece," 

or merely " Mother Athens," and the game is up, 
for the trochaic beat has been suggested. The ec- 
centric scansion of the groups is an adornment; 
but as soon as the original beat has been forgotten, 
they cease implicitly to be eccentric. Variety is 
what is sought ; but if we destroy the original 
mould, one of the terms of this variety is lost, and 
we fall back on sameness. Thus, both as to the 
arithmetical measure of the verse, and the degree 
of regularity in scansion, we see the laws of pros- 
ody to have one common purpose : to keep alive 
the opposition of two schemes simultaneously fol- 
lowed ; to keep them notably apart, though still 
coincident ; and to balance them with such judicial 
nicety before the reader, that neither shall be un- 
perceived and neither signally prevail. 

The rule of rhythm in prose is not so intricate. 
Here, too, we write in groups, or phrases, as I 
prefer to call them, for the prose phrase is greatly 
longer and is much more nonchalantly uttered than 

1 Milton. 



STYLE IN LITERATURE 267 

the group in verse ; so that not only is there a greater 
interval of continuous sound between the pauses, 
but, for that very reason, word is linked more 
readily to word by a more summary enunciation. 
Still, the phrase is the strict analogue of the group, 
and successive phrases, like successive groups, must 
differ openly in length and rhythm. The rule of 
scansion in verse is to suggest no measure but 
the one in hand; in prose, to suggest no measure 
at all. Prose must be rhythmical, and it may be 
as much so as you will ; but it must not be metrical. 
It may be an3^thing, but it must not be verse. A 
single heroic line may very w'ell pass and not dis- 
turb the somewhat larger stride of the prose style ; 
but one following another will produce an instant 
impression of poverty, flatness, and disenchantment. 
The same lines delivered with the measured utter- 
ance of verse would perhaps seem rich in variety. 
By the more summary enunciation proper to prose, 
as to a more distant vision, these niceties of differ- 
ence are lost. A whole verse is uttered as one 
phrase ; and the ear is soon wearied by a succession 
of groups identical in length. The prose writer, 
in fact, since he is allowed to be so much less har- 
monious, is condemned to a perpetually fresh vari- 
ety of movement on a larger scale, and must never 
disappoint the ear by the trot of an accepted metre. 
And this obligation is the third orange with which 
he has to juggle, the third quality which the prose 
writer must work into his pattern of words. It 
may be thought perhaps that this is a quality of 
ease rather than a fresh difficulty ; but such is the 



268 TECHxNICAL ELEMENTS OF 

inherently rhythmical strain of the English lan- 
guage, that the bad writer — and must I take for 
example that admired friend of my boyhood, Cap- 
tain Reid ? — the inexperienced writer, as Dickens 
in his earlier attempts to be impressive, and the 
jaded writer, as any one may see for himself, all 
tend to fall at once into the production of bad blank 
verse. And here it may be pertinently asked. Why 
bad ? And I suppose it might be enough to answer 
that no man ever made good verse by accident, and 
that no verse can ever sound otherwise than trivial 
when uttered with the delivery of prose. But we 
can go beyond such answers. The weak side of 
verse is the regularity of the beat, which in itself 
is decidedly less impressive than the movement of 
the nobler prose ; and it is just into this weak side, 
and this alone, that our careless writer falls. A 
peculiar density and mass, consequent on the near- 
ness of the pauses, is one of the chief good qualities 
of verse; but this our accidental versifier, still 
following after the swift gait and large gestures 
of prose, does not so much as aspire to imitate. 
Lastly, since he remains unconscious that he is 
making verse at all, it can never occur to him to 
extract those effects of counterpoint and opposition 
which I have referred to as the final grace and jus- 
tification of verse, and, I may add, of blank verse 
in particular. 

4. Contents of the Phrase. — Here is a great 
deal of talk about rhythm — and naturally ; for in 
our canorous language rhythm is always at the 
door. But it must not be forgotten that in some 



STYLE IN LITERATURE 269 

languages this element is almost, if not quite, ex- 
tinct, and that in our own it is probably decaying. 
The even speech of many educated Americans 
sounds the note of danger. I should see it go with 
something as bitter as despair, but I should not 
be desperate. As in verse no element, not even 
rhythm, is necessary, so, in prose also, other sorts 
of beauty will arise and take the place and play the 
part of those that we outlive. The beauty of the 
expected beat in verse, the beauty in prose of its 
larger and more lawless melody, patent as they are 
to English hearing, are already silent in the ears 
of our next neighbours ; for in France the oratori- 
cal accent and the pattern of the web have almost 
or altogether succeeded to their places ; and the 
French prose writer would be astounded at the 
labours of his brother across the Channel, and how 
a good quarter of his toil, above all invita Minerva, 
is to avoid writing verse. So wonderfully far 
apart have races wandered in spirit, and so hard 
it is to understand the literature next door ! 

Yet French prose is distinctly better than Eng- 
lish ; and French verse, above all while Hugo lives, 
it will not do to place upon one side. What is 
more to our purpose, a phrase or a verse in French 
is easily distinguishable as comely or uncomely. 
There is then another element of comeliness hitherto 
overlooked in this analysis : the contents of the 
phrase. Each phrase in literature is built of sounds, 
as each phrase i'n music consists of notes. One 
sound suggests, echoes, demands, and harmonises 
with another ; and the art of rightly using these 



270 TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF 

concordances is the final art in literature. It used 
to be a piece of good advice to all young writers to 
avoid alliteration ; and the advice was sound, in so 
far as it prevented daubing. None the less for that, 
was it abominable nonsense, and the mere raving 
of those blindest of the blind who will not see. The 
beauty of the contents of a phrase, or of a sen- 
tence, depends implicitly upon alliteration and upon 
assonance. The vowel demands to be repeated ; 
the consonant demands to be repeated; and both 
cry aloud to be perpetually varied. You may fol- 
low the adventures of a letter through any passage 
that has particularly pleased you ; find it, perhaps, 
denied awhile, to tantalise the ear; find it fired 
again at you in a whole broadside; or find it pass 
into congenerous sounds, one liquid or labial melt- 
ing away into another. And you will find another 
and much stranger circumstance. Literature is 
written by and for two senses : a sort of internal 
ear, quick to perceive " unheard melodies " ; and 
the eye, which directs the pen and deciphers the 
printed phrase. Well, even as there are rhymes 
for the eye, so you will find that there are asso- 
nances and alliterations; that where an author is 
running the open A, deceived by the eye and our 
strange English spelling, he will often show a 
tenderness for the flat A ; and that where he is 
running a particular consonant, he will not im- 
probably rejoice to write it down even when it is 
mute or l^ears a different value. 

Here, then, we have a fresh pattern — a pat- 
tern, to speak grossly, of letters — which makes 



STYLE IN LITERATURE 271 

the fourth preoccupation of the prose writer, and 
the fifth of the versifier. At times it is very deli- 
cate and hard to perceive, and then perhaps most 
excellent and winning (I say perhaps) ; but at 
times again the elements of this literal melody 
stand more boldly forward and usurp the ear. It 
becomes, therefore, somewhat a matter of con- 
science to select examples ; and as I cannot very 
well ask the reader to help me, I shall do the next 
best by giving him the reason or the history of 
each selection. The two first, one in prose, one 
in verse, I chose without previous analysis, simply 
as engaging passages that had long re-echoed in 
my ear. 

" I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, 
unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out 
and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race 
where that immortal garland is to be run for, not 
without dust and heat." ^ Down to " virtue," the 
current S and R are both announced and repeated 
unobtrusively, and by way of a grace-note that 
almost inseparable group PVF is given entire.^ 
The next phrase is a period of repose, almost ugly 
in itself, both S and R still audible, and B given 
as the last fulfilment of PVF. In the next four 
phrases, from " that never " down to " run for," 
the mask is thrown off, and, but for a slight repeti- 

1 Milton. 

2 As PVF will continue to haunt us through our English exam- 
ples, take, by way of comparison, this Latin verse, of which it forms 
a chief atlornment, and do not hold me answerable for the all too 
Roman freedom of the sense : " Hanc volo, quae facilis, quae pallio- 
lata vagatur." 



272 TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF 

tion of the F and V, the whole matter turns, ahnost 
too obtrusively, on S and R ; first S coming to the 
front, and then R. In the concluding phrase all 
these favourite letters, and even the flat A, a timid 
preference for which is just perceptible, are dis- 
carded at a blow and in a bundle ; and to make the 
break more obvious, every word ends with a dental, 
and all but one with T, for which we have been 
cautiously prepared since the beginning. The sin- 
gular dignity of the first clause, and this hammer- 
stroke of the last, go far to make the charm of this 
exquisite sentence. But it is fair to own that S 
and R are used a little coarsely. 

" In Xanadu did Kubla Khan (KANDL) 

A stately pleasure dome decree, (KDLSR) 

Where Alph the sacred river ran, (KANDLSR) 

Through caverns measureless to man, (KANLSR) 

Down to a sunless sea." ^ (N DLS) 

Here I have put the analysis of the main group 
alongside the lines ; and the more it is looked at, 
the more interesting it will seem. But there are 
fiulher niceties. In lines two and four, the current 
S is most delicately varied with Z. In line three, 
the current flat A is twice varied with the open 
A, already suggested in line two, and both times 
(" where " and " sacred ") in conjunction with the 
current R. In the same line F and V (a harmony 
in themselves, even when shorn of their comrade P) 
are admiraljly contrasted. And in line four there 
is a marked subsidiary M, which again was an- 

1 Coleridge. 



STYLE IN LITERATURE 273 

nounced in line two. I stop from weariness, for 
more might yet be said. 

My next example was recently quoted from 
Shakespeare as an example of the poet's colour 
sense. Now, I do not think literature has anything 
to do with colour, or poets anyway the better of 
such a sense ; and I instantly attacked this passage, 
since " purple " was the word that had so pleased 
the writer of the article, to see if there might not be 
some literary reason for its use. It will be seen that 
I succeeded amply ; and I am bound to say I think 
the passage exceptional in Shakespeare — excep- 
tional, indeed, in literature ; but it Vv^as not I who 
chose it. 

" The BaRge she sat iN, like a BURNished throNe 
BURNt oN the water: the POOP was BeateN gold, 
PURPle the sails and so PUR* Fumed that *per 

The wiNds were love-sick with them." ^ 

It may be asked why I have put the F of " per- 
fumed " in capitals ; and I reply, because this 
change from P to F is the completion of that from- 
B to P, already so adroitly carried out. Indeed, 
the whole passage is a monument of curious in- 
genuity; and it seems scarce worth while to indi- 
cate the subsidiary S, L, and W. In the same 
article, a second passage from Shakespeare was 
quoted, once again as an example of his colour 
sense : 

" A mole cinque-spotted Hke the crimson drops 
I' the bottom of a cowslip." ^ 

1 Antony and Cleopatra. ^ Cymbcline. 

18 



274 TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF 

It is very curious, very artificial, and not worth 
while to analyse at length : I leave it to the reader. 
But before I turn my back on Shakespeare, I should 
like to quote a passage, for my own pleasure, and 
for a very model of every technical art : 

" But in the wind and tempest of her frown, \V. P. V.^ F. (st) (ow) 
Distinction with a loud and powerful fan, W. P. F. (st) (ow) L. 
Puffing at all, winnows the light away; W. P. F. L. 
And what hath mass and matter by itself W. F. L. M. A. 
Lies rich in virtue and unmingled."^ V. L. M. 

From these delicate and choice writers I turned 
with some curiosity to a player of the big drum 
— Macaulay. I had in hand the two-volume edi- 
tion, and I opened at the beginning of the second 
volume. Here was what I read : 

"The violence of revolutions is generally proportioned to 
the degree of the maladministration which has produced them. 
It is therefore not strange that the government of Scotland, 
having been during many years greatly more corrupt than the 
government of England, should have fallen with a far heavier 
ruin. The movement against the last king of the house 
of Stuart was in England conservative, in Scotland destruc- 
tive. The English complained not of the law, but of the 
violation of the law." 

This was plain-sailing enough ; it was our old 
friend PVF, floated by the liquids in a body; but 
as I read on, and turned the page, and still found 
PVF with his attendant liquids, I confess my mind 
misgave me utterly. This could be no trick of 
Macaulay's; it must be the nature of the English 

* The V is in " of." 2 Troilus and Cressida. 



\ 



STYLE IN LITERATURE 275 

tongue. In a kind of despair, I turned half-way 
through the volume; and coming upon his lord- 
ship dealing with General Cannon, and fresh from 
Claverhouse and Killiecrankie, here, with eluci- 
dative spelling, was my reward : 

" Meanwhile the disorders of Kannon's Kamp went on in- 
Kreasing. He Kalled a Kouncil of war to Konsider what 
Kourse it would be advisable to taKe. But as soon as the 
Kouncil had met, a preliminary Kuestion was raised. The 
army was almost eKsKlusively a Highland army. The recent 
viKtory had been won eKsKlusively by Highland warriors. 
Great chie/s who had brought siKs or Se7/en hundred /"ighting 
men into the /"ield did not think it /air that they should 
be out7^oted by gentlemen from. Ireland, and yrom the Low 
Kountries, who bore indeed King James's Kommission, and 
were Kalled Kolonels and Kaptains, but who were Kolonels 
without regiments and Kaptains without Kompanies." 

A moment of FV in all this world of K's ! It 
was not the English langtiage, then, that was an 
instrument of one string, but Macaulay that was 
an incomparable dauber. 

It was probably from this barbaric love of re- 
peating the same sound, rather than from any 
design of clearness, that he acquired his irritating 
habit of repeating words ; I say the one rather 
than the other, because such a trick of the ear is 
deeper-seated and more original in man than 
any logical consideration. Few writers, indeed, 
are probably conscious of the length to which 
they push this melody of letters. One, writing 
very diligently, and only concerned about the 
meaning of his words and the rhythm of his 
phrases, was struck into amazement by the eager 



276 TECHNICAL .ELEMENTS OF 

triumph with which he cancelled one expression 
to substitute another. Neither changed the sense ; 
both being monosyllables, neither could affect the 
scansion; and it was only by looking back on 
what he had already written that the mystery was 
solved : the second word contained an open A, 
and for nearly half a page he had been riding 
that vowel to the death. 

In practice, I should add, the ear is not always 
so exacting ; and ordinary writers, in ordinary 
moments, content themselves with avoiding what 
is harsh, and here and there, upon a rare occa- 
sion, buttressing a phrase, or linking two together, 
with a patch of assonance or a momentary jingle 
of alliteration. To understand how constant is this 
preoccupation of good writers, even where its 
results are least obtrusive, it is only necessary to 
turn to the bad. There, indeed, you will find 
cacophony supreme, the rattle of incongruous con- 
sonants only relieved by the jaw-breaking hiatus, 
and whole phrases not to be articulated by the 
powers of man. 

Conclusion. — We may now briefly enumerate 
the elements of style. We have, peculiar to the 
prose writer, the task of keeping his phrases large, 
rhythmical, and pleasing to the ear, without ever 
allowing them to fall into the strictly metrical : 
peculiar to the versifier, the task of combining and 
contrasting his double, treble, and quadruple pat- 
tern, feet and groups, logic and metre — harmoni- 
ous in diversity: common to both, the task of 
artfully combining the prime elements of language 



STYLE IN LITERATURE 277 

into phrases that shall be musical in the mouth ; 
the task of weaving their argument into a texture 
of committed phrases and of rounded periods — 
but this particularly binding in the case of prose : 
and, again common to both, the task of choosing 
apt, explicit, and communicative words. We begin 
to see now what an intricate affair is any perfect 
passage; how many faculties, whether of taste or 
pure reason, must be held upon the stretch to make 
it ; and why, when it is made, it should afford us 
so complete a pleasure. From the arrangement 
of according letters, which is altogether arabesque 
and sensual, up to the architecture of the elegant 
and pregnant sentence, which is a vigorous act of 
the pure intellect, there is scarce a faculty in man 
but has been exercised. We need not wonder, then, 
if perfect sentences are rare, and perfect pages 
rarer. 



II 

A NOTE ON REALISM 

STYLE is the invariable mark of any master; 
and for the student who does not aspire so 
high as to be numbered with the giants, it 
is still the one quality in which he may improve 
himself at will. Passion, wisdom, creative force, 
the power of mystery or colour, are allotted in the 
hour of birth, and can be neither learned nor simu- 
lated. But the just and dexterous use of what 
qualities we have, the proportion of one part to 
another and to the whole, the elision of the use- 
less, the accentuation of tlie important, and the pres- 
ervation of a uniform character from end to end 
— these, which taken together constitute technical 
perfection, are to some degree within the reach 
of industry and intellectual courage. What to put 
in and what to leave out ; whether some particular 
fact be organically necessary or purely ornamental ; 
whether, if it be purely ornamental, it may not 
weaken or obscure the general design ; and finally, 
whether, if we decide to use it, we should do so 
grossly and notably, or in some conventional dis- 
guise : are questions of plastic style continually 
rearising. And the sphinx that patrols the high- 



A NOTE ON REALISM 279 

ways of executive art has no more unanswerable 
riddle to propound. 

In literature (from which I must draw my in- 
stances) the great change of the past century has 
been effected by the admission of detail. It was 
inaugurated by the romantic Scott ; and at length, 
by the semi-romantic Balzac and his more or less 
wholly unromantic followers, bound like a duty on 
the novelist. For some time it signified and ex- 
pressed a more ample contemplation of the condi- 
tions of man's life; but it has recently (at least 
in France) fallen into a merely technical and deco- 
rative stage, which it is, perhaps, still too harsh 
to call survival. With a movement of alarm, the 
wiser or more timid begin to fall a little back 
from these extremities ; they begin to aspire after 
a more naked, narrative articulation ; after the suc- 
cinct, the dignified, and the poetic ; and as a means 
to this, after a general lightening of this baggage 
of detail. After Scott we beheld the starveling 
story — once, in the hands of Voltaire, as abstract 
as a parable — begin to be pampered upon facts. 
The introduction of these details developed a par- 
ticular ability of hand ; and that ability, childishly 
indulged, has led to the works that now amaze us 
on a railway journey. A man of the unquestion- 
able force of M. Zola spends himself on technical 
successes. To afiford a popular flavour and attract 
the mob, he adds a steady current of what I may 
be allowed to call the rancid. That is exciting 
to the moralist; but what more particularly inter- 
ests the artist is this tendency of the extreme of 



28o A NOTE ON REALISM 

detail, when followed as a principle, to degenerate 
into mere fcux-dc-joic of literary tricking. The 
other day even M. Daudet was to be heard bab- 
bling of audible colours and visible sounds. 

This odd suicide of one branch of the realists 
may serve to remind us of the fact which under- 
lies a very dusty conflict of the critics. All repre- 
sentative art, which can be said to live, is both 
realistic and ideal ; and the realism about which 
we quarrel is a matter purely of externals. It is 
no especial cultus of nature and veracity, but a 
mere whim of veering fashion, that has made us 
turn our back upon the larger, more various, and 
more romantic art of yore. A photographic ex- 
actitude in dialogue is now the exclusive fashion ; 
but even in the ablest hands it tells us no more — 
I think it even tells us less — than Moliere, wield- 
ing his artificial medium, has told to us and to all 
time of Alceste or Orgon, Dorine or Chrysale. The 
historical novel is forgotten. Yet truth to the con- 
ditions of man's nature and the conditions of man's 
life, the truth of literary art, is free of the ages. 
It may be told us in a carpet comedy, in a novel 
of adventure, or a fairy tale. The scene may be 
pitched in London, on the sea-coast of Bohemia, 
or away on the mountains of Beulah. And by an 
odd and luminous accident, if there is any page of 
literature calculated to awake the envy of M. Zola, 
it must be that Troiliis mid Cressida which Shake- 
speare, in a spasm of unmanly anger with the 
world, grafted on the heroic story of the siege of 
Troy. 



A NOTE ON REALISM 281 

This question of realism, let it then be clearly 
understood, regards nut in the least degree the 
fundamental truth, but only the technical method, 
of a work of art. Be as ideal or as abstract as 
you please, you will be none the less veracious ; 
but if you be weak, you run the risk of being 
tedious and inexpressive ; and if you be very strong 
and honest, you may chance upon a masterpiece. 

A work of art is first cloudily conceived in the 
mind; during the period of gestation it stands 
more clearly forward from these swaddling mists, 
puts on expressive lineaments, and becomes at 
length that most faultless, but also, alas ! that in- 
communicable product of the human mind, a per- 
fected design. On the approach to execution all 
is changed. The artist must now step down, don 
his working clothes, and become the artisan. He 
now resolutely commits his airy conception, his 
delicate Ariel, to the touch of matter; he must 
decide, almost in a breath, the scale, the style, the 
spirit, and the particularity of execution of his 
whole design. 

The engendering idea of some works is stylistic ; 
a technical preoccupation stands them instead of 
some robuster principle of life. And with these the 
execution is but play ; for the stylistic problem is 
resolved beforehand, and all large originality of 
treatment wilfully foregone. Such are the verses, 
intricately designed, which we have learnt to ad- 
mire, with a certain smiling admiration, at the 
hands of Mr. Lang and Mr. Dobson ; such, too, 
are those canvases where dexterity or even breadth 



282 A NOTE ON REALISM 

of plastic style takes the place of pictorial nobility 
of design. So, it may be remarked, it was easier to 
begin to write Esmond than Inanity Fair, since, 
in the first, the style was dictated by the nature of 
the plan ; and Thackeray, a man probably of some 
indolence of mind, enjoyed and got good profit 
of this economy of effort. But the case is excep- 
tional. Usually in all works of art that have been 
conceived from within outwards, and generously 
nourished from the author's mind, the moment in 
which he begins to execute is one of extreme per- 
plexity and strain. Artists of indifferent energy 
and an imperfect devotion to their own ideal make 
this ungrateful effort once for all ; and, having' 
formed a style, adhere to it through life. But 
those of a higher order cannot rest content with a 
process which, as they continue to employ it, must 
infallibly degenerate towards the academic and the 
cut-and-dried. Every fresh work in which they 
embark is the signal for a fresh engagement of 
the whole forces of their mind ; and the chang- 
ing views which accompany the growth of their 
experience are marked by still more sweeping 
alterations in the manner of their art. So that 
criticism loves to dwell upon and distinguish the 
varying periods of a Raphael, a Shakespeare, or 
a Beethoven. 

It is, then, first of all, at this initial and decisive 
moment when execution is begun, and thenceforth 
only in a less degree, that the ideal and the real 
do indeed, like good and evil angels, contend for 
the direction of the work. Marble, paint, and 



A NOTE ON REALISM 283 

language, the pen, the needle, and the brush, all have 
their grossnesses, their ineffable impotences, their 
hours, if I may so express myself, of insubordina- 
tion. It is the work and it is a great part of the 
delight of any artist to contend with these unruly 
tools, and now by brute energy, now by witty 
expedient, to drive and coax them to effect his 
will. Given these means, so laughably inadequate, 
and given the interest, the intensity, and the mul- 
tiplicity of the actual sensation whose effect he is 
to render with their aid, the artist has one main 
and necessary resource which he must, in every 
case and upon any theory, employ. He must, that 
is, suppress much and omit more. He must omit 
what is tedious or irrelevant, and suppress what is 
tedious and necessary. But such facts as, in regard 
to the main design, subserve a variety of purposes, 
he will perforce and eagerly retain. And it is the 
mark of the very highest order of creative art to 
be woven exclusively of such. There, any fact 
that is registered is contrived a double or a treble 
debt to pay, and is at once an ornament in its 
place, and a pillar in the main design. Nothing 
would find room in such a picture that did not 
serve, at once, to complete the composition, to ac- 
centuate the scheme of colour, to distinguish the 
planes of distance, and to strike the note of the 
selected sentiment ; nothing would be allowed in 
such a stoiy that did not, at the same time, expedite 
the progress of the fable, build up the characters, 
and strike home the moral or the philosophical de- 
sign. But this is unattainable. As a rule, so far 



284 A NOTE ON REALISM 

from building the fabric of our works exclusively 
with these, we are thrown into a rapture if we 
think we can muster a dozen or a score of them, 
to be the plums of our confection. And hence, in 
order that the canvas may be filled or the story 
proceed from point to point, other details must 
be admitted. They must be admitted, alas! upon 
a doubtful title ; many without marriage robes. 
Thus any work of art, as it proceeds towards 
completion, too often — I had almost written al- 
ways — loses in force and poignancy of main 
design. Our little air is swamped and dwarfed 
among hardly relevant orchestration; our little 
passionate story drowns in a deep sea of descrip- 
tive eloquence or slipshod talk. 

But again, we are rather more tempted to admit 
those particulars which we know we can describe; 
and hence those most of all which, having been 
described very often, have grown to be conven- 
tionally treated in the practice of our art. These 
we choose, as the mason chooses the acanthus to 
adorn his capital, because they come naturally to 
the accustomed hand. The old stock incidents and 
accessories, tricks of workmanship, and schemes 
of composition (all being admirably good, or they 
would long have been forgotten) haunt and tempt 
our fancy, offer us ready-made but not perfectly 
appropriate solutions for any problem that arises, 
and wean us from the study of nature and the 
uncompromising practice of art. To struggle, to 
face nature, to find fresh solutions, and give 
expression to facts which have not yet been 



A NOTE ON REALISM 285 

adequately or not yet elegantly expressed, is to 
run a little upon the danger of extreme self-love. 
Difficulty sets a high price upon achievement; and 
the artist may easily fall into the error of the 
French naturalists, and consider any fact as wel- 
come to admission if it be the ground of brilliant 
handiwork ; or, again, into the error of the modern 
landscape-painter, who is apt to think that difficulty 
overcome and science well displayed can take the 
place of what is, after all, the one excuse and 
breath of art — charm. A little further, and he 
will regard charm in the light of an unworthy 
sacrifice to prettiness, and the omission of a tedious 
passage as an infidelity to art. 

We have now the matter of this difference before 
us. The idealist, his eye singly fixed upon the 
greater outlines, loves rather to fill up the inter- 
val with detail of the conventional order, briefly 
touched, soberly suppressed in tone, courting neg- 
lect. But the realist, with a fine intemperance, 
will not suffer the presence of anything so dead 
as a convention ; he shall have all fiery, all hot- 
pressed from nature, all charactered and notable, 
seizing the eye. The style that befits either of 
these extremes, once chosen, brings with it its 
necessary disabilities and dangers. The immediate 
danger of the realist is to sacrifice the beauty and 
significance of the whole to local dexterity, or, in 
the insane pursuit of completion, to immolate his 
readers under facts ; but he comes in the last 
resort, and as his energy declines, to discard all 
design, abjure all choice, and, with scientific thor- 



286 A NOTE ON REALISM 

oughness, steadily to communicate matter which is 
not worth learning. The danger of the idealist is, 
of course, to become merely null and lose all grip 
of fact, particularity, or passion. 

We talk of bad and good. Everything, indeed, 
is good which is conceived with honesty and ex- 
ecuted with communicative ardour. But though on 
neither side is dogmatism fitting, and though in 
every case the artist must decide for himself, and 
decide afresh and yet afresh for each succeeding 
work and new creation ; yet one thing may be 
generally said, that we of the last quarter of the 
nineteenth century, breathing as we do the intel- 
lectual atmosphere of our age, are more apt to 
err upon the side of realism than to sin in quest of 
the ideal. Upon that theory it may be well to 
watch and correct our own decisions, always hold- 
ing back the hand from the least appearance of 
irrelevant dexterity, and resolutely fixed to begin 
no work that is not philosophical, passionate, dig- 
nified, happily mirthful, or, at the last and least, 
romantic in design. 



Ill 

THE MORALITY OF THE PRO- 
FESSION OF LETTERS 

THE profession of letters has been lately 
debated in the public prints; and it has 
been debated, to put the matter mildly, 
from a point of view that was calculated to sur- 
prise high-minded men, and bring a general con- 
tempt on books and reading. Some time ago, in 
particular, a lively, pleasant, popular writer ^ de- 
voted an essay, lively and pleasant like himself, 
to a very encouraging view of the profession. We 
may be glad that his experience is so cheering, 
and we may hope that all others, who deserve it, 
shall be as handsomely rewarded ; but I do not 
think we need be at all glad to have this question, 
so important to the public and ourselves, debated 
solely on the ground of money. The salary in 
any business under heaven is not the only, nor 
indeed the first, question. That you should con- 
tinue to exist is a matter for your own considera- 
tion ; but that your business should be first honest, 
and second useful, are points in which honour and 
morality are concerned. If the writer to whom I 

1 Mr. James Payn. 



288 MORALITY OF THE 

refer succeeds in persuading a number of young 
persons to adopt this way of life with an eye set 
singly on the livelihood, we must expect them in 
their works to follow profit only, and we must 
expect in consequence, if he will pardon me the 
epithets, a slovenly, base, untrue, and empty litera- 
ture. Of that writer himself I am not speaking: 
he is diligent, clean, and pleasing; we all owe him 
periods of entertainment, and he has achieved an 
amiable popularity which he has adequately de- 
served. But the truth is, he does not, or did not 
when he first embraced it, regard his profession 
from this purely mercenary side. He went into 
it. I shall venture to say, if not with any noble 
design, at least in the ardour of a first love; and 
he enjoyed its practice long before he paused to 
calculate the wage. The other day an author was 
complimented on a piece of work, good in itself 
and exceptionally good for him, and replied, in 
terms unworthy of a commercial traveller, that as 
the book was not briskly selling he did not give a 
copper farthing for its merit. It must not be sup- 
posed that the person to whom this answer was 
addressed received it as a profession of faith; he 
knew, on the other hand, that it was only a whiff 
of irritation ; just as we know, when a respectable 
writer talks of literature as a way of life, like 
shoe-making, but not so useful, that he is only de- 
bating one aspect of a question, and is still clearly 
conscious of a dozen others more important in 
themselves and more central to the matter in hand. 
But while those who treat literature in this penny- 



PROFESSION OF LETTERS 289 

wise and virtue-foolish spirit are themselves truly 
in possession of a better light, it does not follow 
that the treatment is decent or improving^, whether 
for themselves or others. To treat all subjects in 
the highest, the most honourable, and the pluckiest 
spirit, consistent with the fact, is the first duty of 
a writer. If he be well paid, as I am glad to hear 
he is, this duty becomes the more urgent, the 
neglect of it the more disgraceful. And per- 
haps there is no subject on which a man should 
speak so gravely as that industry, whatever it 
may be, which is the occupation or delight of his 
life ; which is his tool to earn or serve with ; and 
which, if it be unworthy, stamps himself as a 
mere incubus of dumb and greedy bowels on the 
shoulders of labouring humanity. On that subject 
alone even to force the note might lean to virtue's 
side. It is to be hoped that a numerous and 
enterprising generation of writers will follow and 
surpass the present one; but it would be better if 
the stream were stayed, and the roll of our old, 
honest English books were closed, than that esu- 
rient book-makers should continue and debase a 
brave tradition, and lower, in their own eyes, 
a famous race. Better that our serene temples 
were deserted than filled with trafficking and jug- 
gling priests. 

There are two just reasons for the choice of any 
way of life: the first is inbred taste in the chooser; 
the second some high utility in the industry selected. 
Literature, like any other art, is singularly inter- 
esting to the artist ; and, in a degree peculiar to 

19 



290 MORALITY OF THE 

itself among the arts, it is useful to mankind. 
These are the sufficient justifications for any young 
man or woman who adopts it as the business of 
his life. I shall not say much about the wages. 
A writer can live by his writing. If not so luxu- 
riously as by other trades, then less luxuriously. 
The nature of the work he does all day will more 
affect his happiness than the quality of his dinner 
at night. Whatever be your calling, and however 
much it brings you in the year, you could still, you 
know, get more by cheating. We all suffer our- 
selves to be too much concerned about a little 
poverty; but such considerations should not move 
us in the choice of that which is to be the business 
and justification of so great a portion of our lives; 
and like the missionary, the patriot, or the philoso- 
pher, we should all choose that poor and brave 
career in which we can do the most and best for 
mankind. Now Nature, faithfully followed, proves 
herself a careful mother. A lad, for some liking 
to the jingle of words, betakes himself to letters 
for his life ; by-and-by, when he learns more 
gravity, he finds that he has chosen better than 
he knew ; that if he earns little, he is earning it 
amply; that if he receives a small w^age, he is in 
a position to do consideraljle services ; that it is 
in his power, in some small measure, to protect 
the oppressed and to defend the truth. So kindly 
is the world arranged, such great profit may arise 
from a small degree of human reliance on oneself, 
and such, in particular, is the happy star of this 
trade of writing, that it should combine pleasure 



PROFESSION OF LETTERS 291 

and profit to both parties, and be at once agreeable, 
Hke fiddling, and useful, like good preaching. 

This is to speak of literature at its highest ; and 
with the four great elders who are still spared to 
our respect and admiration, with Carlyle, Ruskin, 
Browning, and Tennyson before us, it would be 
cowardly to consider it at first in any lesser as- 
pect. But while we cannot follow these athletes, 
while we may none of us, perhaps, be very vigor- 
ous, very original, or very wise, I still contend 
that, in the humblest sort of literary work, we 
have it in our power either to do great harm or 
great good. We may seek merely to please ; we 
may seek, having no higher gift, merely to gratify 
the idle nine days' curipsit}^ of our contemporaries ; 
or we may essay, however feebly, to instruct. In 
each of these we shall have to deal with that re- 
markable art of words which, because it is the 
dialect of life, comes home so easily and power- 
fully to the minds of men ; and since that is so, 
we contribute, in each of these branches, to build 
up the sum of sentiments and appreciations which 
goes by the name of Public Opinion or Public 
Feeling. The total of a nation's reading, in these 
days of daily papers, greatly modifies the total of 
the nation's speech; and the speech and reading, 
taken together, form the efficient educational me- 
dium of youth. A good man or woman may 
keep a youth some little while in clearer air; 
but the contemporary atmosphere is all-powerful 
in the end on the average of mediocre characters. 
The copious Corinthian baseness of the American 



292 MORALITY OF THE 

reporter or the Parisian cJironiqucr, both so lightly 
readable, must exercise an incalculable influence 
for ill ; they touch upon all subjects, and on all 
with the same ungenerous hand ; they begin the 
consideration of all, in young and unprepared 
minds, in an unworthy spirit ; on all, they supply 
some pungency for dull people to quote. The 
mere body of this ugly matter overwhelms the rare 
utterances of good men ; the sneering, the selfish, 
and the cowardly are scattered in broad sheets 
on every table, while the antidote, in small vol- 
umes, lies unread upon the shelf. I have spoken 
of the American and the French, not because 
they are so much baser, but so much more read- 
able, than the English ; their evil is done more 
effectively, in America for the masses, in France 
for the few that care to read ; but with us as with 
them, the duties of literature are daily neglected, 
truth daily perverted and suppressed, and grave 
subjects daily degraded in the treatment. The 
journalist is not reckoned an important officer ; 
yet judge of the good he might do, the harm he 
does; judge of it by one instance only: that when 
we find two journals on the reverse sides of poli- 
tics each; on the same day, openly garbling a piece 
of news for the interest of its own party, we 
smile at the discovery (no discovery now!) as over 
a good joke and pardonable stratagem. Lying so 
open is scarce lying, it is true ; but one of the 
things that we profess to teach our young is a 
respect for truth ; and I cannot think this piece of 
education will be crowned with any great success. 



PROFESSION OF LETTERS 293 

so long as some of us practise and the rest openly 
approve of public falsehood. 

There are two duties incumbent upon any man 
who enters on the business of writing: truth to 
the fact and a good spirit in the treatment. In 
every department of literature, though so low as 
hardly to deserve the name, truth to the fact is of 
importance to the education and comfort of man- 
kind, and so hard to preserve, that the faithful 
trying to do so will lend some dignity to the man 
who tries it. Our judgments are based upon two 
things : first, upon the original preferences of our 
soul ; but, second, upon the mass of testimony to 
the nature of God, man, and the universe which 
reaches us, in divers manners, from without. For 
the most part these divers manners are reducible 
to one, all that we learn of past times and much 
that we learn of our own reaching us through the 
medium of books or papers, and even he who can- 
not read learning from the same source at second- 
hand and by the report of him who can. Thus 
the sum of the contemporary knowledge or igno- 
rance of good and evil is, in large measure, the 
handiwork of those who write. Those who write 
have to see that each man's knowledge is, as near as 
they can make it, answerable to the facts of life; 
that he shall not suppose himself an angel or a 
monster ; nor take this world for a hell ; nor be 
suffered to imagine that all rights are concentred 
in his own caste or country, or all veracities in his 
own parochial creed. Each man should learn what 
is within him, that he may strive to mend ; he 



294 MORALITY OF THE 

must be taiiglit what is without him, that he mny 
be kind to others. It can never be wrong to teh 
him the truth; for, in his disputable state, weav- 
ing- as he goes his theory of hfe, steering himself, 
cheering or reproving others, all facts are of the 
first importance to his conduct ; and even if a fact 
shall discourage or corrupt him, it is still best that 
he should know it; for it is in this world as it is, 
and not in a world made easy by educational sup- 
pressions, that he must win his way to shame or 
glory. In one W'Ord, it must always be foul to tell 
what is false ; and it can never be safe to suppress 
what is true. The very fact that you omit may be 
the fact which somebody w^as wanting, for one 
man's meat is another man's poison, and I have 
known a person who was cheered by the perusal 
of Candid e. Every fact is a part of that great 
puzzle we must set together ; and none that comes 
directly in a writer's path but has some nice re- 
lations, unperceivable by him, to the totality and 
l)earing of the subject under hand. Yet there are 
certain classes of fact eternally more necessary than 
(Others, and it is with these that literature must 
first bestir itself. They are not hard to distin- 
guish, nature once more easily leading us ; for the 
necessary, because the efficacious, facts are those 
which are most interesting to the natural mind 
of man. Those which are coloured, picturesque, 
human, and rooted in morality, and those, on the 
other hand, which are clear, indisputable, and a 
part of science, are alone vital in importance, seiz- 
ing by their interest, or useful to communicate. So 



PROFESSION OF LETTERS 295 

far as the writer merely narrates, he should prin- 
cipally tell of these. He should tell of the kind 
and wholesome and beautiful elements of our life; 
he should tell unsparingly of the evil and sorrow 
of the present, to move us with instances ; he 
should tell of wise and good people in the past, 
to excite us by example; and of these he should 
tell soberly and truthfully, not glossing faults, that 
we may neither grow discouraged with ourselves 
nor exacting to our neighbours. So the body of 
contemporary literature, ephemeral and feeble in 
itself, touches in the minds of men the springs 
of thought and kindness, and supports them (for 
those who will go at all are easily supported) on 
their way to what is true and right. And if, in 
any degree, it does so now, how much more might 
it do so if the writers chose! There is not a life 
in all the records of the past but, properly studied, 
might lend a hint and a help to some contempo- 
rary. There is not a juncture in to-day's affairs 
but some useful word may yet be said of it. Even 
the reporter has an office, and, with clear eyes and 
honest language, may unveil injustices and point 
the way to progress. And for a last word : in all 
narration there is only one way to be clever, and 
that is to be exact. To be vivid is a secondar}'- 
cjuality wdiich must presuppose the first ; for vividly 
to convey a wrong impression is only to make 
failure conspicuous. 

But a fact may be viewed on many sides; it 
may be chronicled with rage, tears, laughter, in- 
difference, or admiration, and by each of these the 



296 MORALITY OF THE 

story will be transformed to something else. The 
newspapers that told of the return of our repre- 
sentatives from Berlin, even if they had not dif- 
fered as to the facts, would have sufficiently differed 
by their spirits; so that the one description would 
have been a second ovation, and the other a pro- 
longed insult. The subject makes but a trifling 
part of any piece of literature, and the view of 
the writer is itself a fact more important because 
less disputable than the others. Now this spirit 
in which a subject is regarded, important in all 
kinds of literary work, becomes all-important in 
works of fiction, meditation, or rhapsody; for 
there it not only colours but itself chooses the 
facts; not only inodifies but shapes the work. 
And hence, over the far larger proportion of the 
field of literature, the health or disease of the 
writer's mind or momentary humour forms not only 
the leading feature of his work, but is, at bottom, 
the only thing he can communicate to others. In 
all works of art, widely speaking', it is first of all the 
author's attitude that is narrated, though in the 
attitude there be implied a whole experience and a 
theory of life. An author who has begged the 
question and reposes in some narrow faith can- 
not, if he would, express the whole or even many 
of the sides of this various existence ; for, his own 
life being maim, some of them are not admitted in 
his theory, and were only dimly and unwillingly 
recognised in his experience. Hence the small- 
ness, the triteness, and the inhumanity in works of 
merely sectarian religion ; and hence we find equal 



PROFESSION OF LETTERS 297 

although unsimilar limitation in works inspired by 
the spirit of the tlesh or the despicable taste for high 
society. So that the first duty of any man who is 
to write is intellectual. Designedly or not, he has so 
far set himself up for a leader of the minds of men ; 
and he must see that his own mind is kept supple, 
charitable, and bright. Everything but .prejudice 
should find a voice through him ; he should see the 
good in all things ; where he has ex^en a fear that 
he does not wholly understand, there he should be 
wholly silent ; and he should recognise from the 
first that he has only one tool in his workshop, and 
that tool is sympathy.^ 

The second duty, far harder to define, is moral. 
There are a thousand different humours in the 
mind, and about each of them, when it is upper- 
most, some literature tends to be deposited. Is this 
to be allowed ? Not certainly in every case, and 
yet perhaps in more than rigorists would fancy. 
It were to be desired that all literary work, and 
chiefly works of art, issued from sound, human, 
healthy, and potent impulses, whether grave or 
laughing, humourous, romantic, or religious. Yet 
it cannot be denied that some valuable books are 
partially insane; some, mostly religious, partially 
inhuman ; and very many tainted with morbidity 
and impotence. We do not loathe a masterpiece 

1 A footnote, at least, is clue to the admirable example set before 
all young writers in the width of literary sympathy displayed by 
Mr. Swinburne. He runs forth to welcome merit, whether in 
Dickens or Trollope, whether in Villon, Milton, or Pope. This is, 
in criticism, the attitude we should all seek to preserve, not only in 
that, but in every branch of literary work. 



298 MORALITY OF THE 

although we gird against its blemishes. We are 
not, above all, to look for faults, but merits. 
There is no book perfect, even in design ; but 
there are many that will delight, improve, or 
encourage the reader. On the one hand, the 
Hebrew psalms are the only religious poetry on 
earth ; yet they contain sallies that savour rankly 
of the man of blood. On the other hand, Alfred 
de Musset had a poisoned and a contorted nature ; 
I am only quoting" that generous and frivolous 
giant, old Dumas, v/hen I accuse him of a bad 
heart ; yet, when the impulse under which he wrote 
was purely creative, he could give us works like 
Cannosinc or Faiitasio, in which the last note of 
the romantic comedy seems to ha\'e been found 
again to touch and please us. When Flaubert 
wrote Madame Bovary, I believe he thought chiefly 
of a somewhat morbid realism ; and behold ! the 
book turned in his hands into a masterpiece of 
appalling morality. But the truth is, when books 
are conceived under a great stress, with a soul of 
ninefold power, nine times heated and electrified 
by effort, the conditions of our being are seized 
with such an ample grasp, that, even should the 
main design be trivial or base, some truth and 
beauty cannot fail to be expressed. Out of the 
strong comes forth sweetness ; but an ill thing 
poorly done is an ill thing top and bottom. And 
so this can be no encouragement to knock-kneed, 
feeble-wristed scribes, who must take dieir business 
conscientiously or be ashamed to practise it. 

Man is imperfect ; yet, in his literature, he must 



PROFESSION OF LETTERS 299 

express himself and his own views and preferences; 
for to do anything else is to do a far more perilous 
thing than to risk being immoral : it is to be sure 
of being untrue. To ape a sentiment, even a good 
one, is to travesty a sentiment ; that will not be 
helpful. To conceal a sentiment, if you are sure 
you hold it, is to take a liberty with truth. There 
is probably no point of view possible to a sane man 
but contains some truth and, in the true connection, 
might be profitable to the race. I am not afraid of 
the truth, if any one could tell it me, but I am afraid 
of parts of it impertinently uttered. There is a 
time to dance and a time to mourn ; to be harsh as 
well as to be sentimental ; to be ascetic as well as to 
glorify the appetites ; and if a man were to combine 
all these extremes into his work, each in its place 
and proportion, that work would be the world's 
masterpiece of morality as well as of art. Par- 
tiality is immorality ; for any book is wrong that 
gives a misleading picture of the world and life. 
The trouble is that the weakling must be partial ; 
the work of one proving dank and depressing ; of 
another, cheap and vulgar; of a third, epilepti- 
cally sensual ; of a fourth, sourly ascetic. In litera- 
ture as in conduct, you can never hope to do exactly 
right. All you can do is to make as sure as pos- 
sible ; and for that there is but one rule. Nothing 
should be done in a hurry that can be done slowly. 
It is no use to write a book and put it by for nine 
or even ninety years ; for in the writing you will 
have partly convinced yourself; the delay must pre- 
cede any beginning; and if you meditate a work 



300 MORALITY OF THE 

of art, you should first long roll the subject under 
the tongue to make sure you like the flavour, before 
you brew a volume that shall taste of it from end 
to end; or if you propose to enter on the field of 
controversy, you should first have thought upon the 
cjuestion under all conditions, in health as well as 
in sickness, in sorrow as well as in joy. It is this 
nearness of examination necessary for any true and 
kind writing, that makes the practice of the art a 
prolonged and noble education for the writer. 

There is plenty to do, plenty to say, or to say 
over again, in the meantime. Any literary work 
which conveys faithful facts or pleasing impres- 
sions is a service to the public. It is even a service 
to be thankfully proud of having rendered. The 
slightest novels are a blessing to those in distress, 
not chloroform itself a greater. Our fine old sea- 
captain's life was justified when Carlyle soothed his 
mind with The King's Ozmi or Nezvton Forstcr. 
To please is to serve ; and so far from its being dif- 
ficult to instruct while you amuse, it is difficult to 
do the one thoroughly without the other. Some 
part of the writer or his life will crop out in even 
a vapid book; and to read a novel that was con- 
ceived with any force is to multiply experience and 
to exercise the sympathies. Every article, every 
piece of verse, every essay, every cntrc-Hlct, is des- 
tined to pass, however swiftly, through the minds 
of some portion of the public, and to colour, how- 
ever transiently, their thoughts. When any sub- 
ject falls to be discussed, some scribbler on a paper 
has the invaluable opportunity of beginning its 



PROFESSION OF LETTERS 301 

discussion in a dignified and human spirit ; and if 
there were enough who did so in our pubhc press, 
neither the pubhc nor the Parhament would find it 
in their minds to ch^op to meaner thoughts. The 
writer has the chance to stumble, by the way, on 
something pleasing, something interesting, some- 
thing ertcouraging, were it only to a single reader. 
He will be unfortunate, indeed, if he suit no one. 
He has the chance, besides, to stumble on some- 
thing that a dull person shall be able to compre- 
hend ; and for a dull person to have read anything 
and, for that once, comprehended it, makes a mark- 
ing epoch in his education. 

Here, then, is work worth doing and worth trying 
to do well. And so, if I were minded to welcome 
any great accession to our trade, it should not be 
from any reason of a higher wage, but because it 
was a trade which w^as useful in a very great and in 
a very high degree ; which every honest tradesman 
could make more serviceable to mankind in his 
single strength ; which was difficult to do well and 
possible to do better every year ; which called for 
scrupulous thought on the part of all who practised 
it, and hence became a perpetual education to their 
nobler natures ; and which, pay it as you please, in 
the large majority of the best cases will still be 
underpaid. For surely, at this time of day in the 
nineteenth century, there is nothing that an honest 
man should fear more timorously than getting and 
spending more than he deserves. 



IV 

THE DAY AFTER TO-MORROW 

HISTORY is much decried ; it is a tissue of 
errors, we are told no doubt correctly; 
and rival historians expose each other's 
blunders with gratification. Yet the worst histo- 
rian has a clearer view of the period he studies than 
the best of us can hope to form of that in which we 
live. The obscurest epoch is to-day ; and that for a 
thousand reasons of inchoate tendency, conflicting 
report, and sheer mass and multiplicity of expe- 
rience; but chiefly, perhaps, by reason of an in- 
sidious shifting of landmarks. Parties and ideas 
continually move, but not by measurable marches on 
a stable course; the political soil itself steals forth 
by imperceptible degrees, like a travelling glacier, 
carrying on its bosom not only political parties but 
their flag-posts and cantonments ; so that what ap- 
pears to be an eternal city founded on hills is but 
a flying island of Laputa. It is for this reason in 
particular that we are all becoming Socialists with- 
out knowing it ; by which I would not in the least 
refer to the acute case of Mr. Hyndman and his 
horn-blowing supporters, sounding their trumps 
of a Sunday within the walls of our individualist 



DAY AFTER TO-MORROW 303 

Jericho, but to the stealthy change that has come 
over the spirit of Enghshmen and Enghsh legisla- 
tion. A little while ago, and we were still for 
liberty ; " Crowd a few more thousands on the 
bench of Government," w^e seemed to cry ; " keep 
her head direct on liberty, and we cannot help but 
come to port." This is over; laisscr-fairc declines 
in favour ; our legislation grows authoritative, 
growls philanthropical, bristles with new duties and 
new penalties, and casts a spawn of inspectors, 
w'ho now begin, note-book in hand, to darken the 
face of England. It may be right or wrong, we are 
not trying that ; but one thing it is beyond doubt : 
it is Socialism in action, and the strange thing is 
that we scarcely know it. 

Liberty has served us a long while, and it may be 
time to seek new altars. Like all other principles, 
she has been proved to be self -exclusive in the long 
run. She has taken wages besides (like all other 
virtues) and dutifully served AI amnion ; so that 
many things we were accustomed to admire as the 
benefits of freedom and common to all were truly 
benefits of wealth, and took their value from our 
neighbours' poverty. A few shocks of logic, a few 
disclosures (in the journalistic phrase) of what 
the freedom of manufacturers, landlords, or ship- 
owners may imply for operatives, tenants, or sea- 
men, and we not unnaturally begin to turn to that 
other pole of hope, beneficent tyranny. Freedom, 
to be desirable, involves kindness, wisdom, and all 
the virtues of the free ; but the free man as we have 
seen him in action has been, as of yore, only the 



304 DAY AFTER TO-MORROW 

master of many helots; and the slaves are still ill 
fed, ill clad, ill taught, ill housed, insolently treated, 
and driven to their mines and workshops by the 
lash of famine. So much, in other men's affairs, 
we have begun to see clearly ; we have begun to 
despair of virtue in these other men, and from our 
seat in Parliament begin to discharge upon them, 
thick as arrows, the host of our inspectors. The 
landlord has long shaken his head over the manu- 
facturer ; those who do business on land have lost 
all trust in the virtues of the ship-owner; the pro- 
fessions look askance upon the retail traders and 
have even started their co-operative stores to ruin 
them ; and from out the smoke-wreaths of Birming- 
ham a finger has begun to write upon the wall 
the condemnation of the landlord. Thus, piece by 
piece, do we condemn each other, and yet not per- 
ceive the conclusion, that our whole estate is some- 
what damnable. Thus, piece by piece, each acting 
against his neighbour, each sawing away the branch 
on which some other interest is seated, do we apply 
in detail our Socialistic remedies, and yet not per- 
ceive that we are all labouring together to bring in 
Socialism at large. A tendency so stupid and so 
selfish is like to prove invincible ; and if Socialisn; 
be at all a practicable rule of life, there is every 
chance that our grandchildren will see the day and 
taste the pleasures of existence in something far 
liker an ant-heap than any previous human polity. 
And this not in the least because of the voice of 
Mr. Hyndman or the horns of his followers ; but 
by the mere glacier movement of the political soil, 



DAY AFTER TO-MORROW 305 

bearing forward on its bosom, apparently undis- 
turbed, the proud camps of Whig and Tory. If 
Mr. Hyndman were a man of keen humour, which 
is far from my conception of his character, he 
might rest from his troubhng and look on : the 
walls of Jericho begin already to crumble and dis- 
solve. That great servile war, the Armageddon 
of money and numbers, to which we looked for- 
ward when young, becomes more and more un- 
likely ; and we may rather look to see a peaceable 
and blindfold evolution, the work of dull men im- 
mersed in political tactics and dead to political 
results. 

The principal scene of this comedy lies, of course, 
in the House of Commons ; it is there, besides, that 
the details of this new evolution (if it proceed) will 
fall to be decided ; so that the state of Parliamem; 
is not only diagnostic of the present but fatefully 
prophetic of the future. Well, we all know what 
Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it. We 
may pardon it some faults, indeed, on the ground 
of Irish obstruction — a bitter trial, which it sup- 
ports with notable good-humour. But the excuse 
is merely local ; it cannot apply to similar bodies in 
America and France ; and what are we to say of 
these ? President Cleveland's letter may serve as a 
picture of the one; a glance at almost any paper 
will convince us of the weakness of the other. 
Decay appears to have seized on the organ of popu- 
lar government in every land ; and this just at the 
moment when we begin to bring to it, as to an oracle 
of justice, the whole skein of our private affairs 



3o6 DAY AFTER TO-MORROW 

to be unravelled, and ask it, like a new Messiah, 
to take upon itself our frailties and play for us the 
part that should be played by our own virtues. For 
that, in few words, is the case. We cannot trust 
ourselves to behave with decency ; we cannot trust 
our consciences ; and the remedy proposed is to 
elect a round number of our neighbours, pretty 
much at random, and say to these : " Be ye our 
conscience; make laws so wise, and continue from 
year to year to administer them so wisely, that 
they shall save us from ourselves and make us 
righteous and happy, world without end. Amen." 
And who can look twice at the British Parliament 
and then seriously bring it such a task? I am not 
advancing this as an argument against Socialism : 
once again, nothing is further from my mind. 
There are great truths in Socialism, or no one, not 
even Mr. Hyndman, would be found to hold it; 
and if it came, and did one-tenth part of what it 
offers, I for one should make it welcome. But if 
it is to come, we may as well have some notion of 
what it will be like; and the first thing to grasp is 
that our new polity will be designed and adminis- 
tered (to put it courteously) with something short 
of inspiration. It will be made, or will grow, in a 
human parliament ; and the one thing that will not 
very hugely change is human nature. The Anar- 
chists think otherwise, from which it is only plain 
that they have not carried to the study of history 
the lamp of human sympathy. 

Given, then, our new polity, with its new waggon- 
load of laws, what head-marks must we look for 



DAY AFTER TO-MORROW 307 

in the life? We chafe a good deal at that excellent 
thing, the income tax, because it brings into our 
affairs the prying fingers, and exposes us to the tart 
words, of the official. The official, in all degrees, 
is already something of a terror to many of us. I 
would not willingly have to do with even a police 
constable in any other spirit than that of kindness. 
I still remember in my dreams the eye-glass of a 
certain attache at a certain embassy — an eye-glass 
that was a standing indignity to all on whom it 
looked ; and my next most disagreeable remem- 
brance is of a bracing, Republican postman in the 
city of San Francisco. I lived in that city among 
working-folk, and what my neighbours accepted at 
the postman's hands — nay, what I took from him 
myself — it is still distasteful to recall. The bour- 
geois, residing in the upper parts of society, has 
but few opportunities of tasting this peculiar bowl ; 
but about the income tax, as I have said, or perhaps 
about a patent, or in the halls of an embassy at the 
hands of my friend of the eye-glass, he occasionally 
sets his lips to it; and he may thus imagine (if 
he has that faculty of imagination, without which 
most faculties are void) how it tastes to his poorer 
neighbours, who must drain it to the dregs. In 
every contact with authority, with their employer, 
with the police, with the School Board officer, in the 
hospital, or in the workhouse, they have equally the 
occasion to appreciate the light-hearted civility of 
the man in office ; and as an experimentalist in 
several out-of-the-way provinces of life, I may say 
it has but to be felt to be appreciated. Well, 



3o8 DAY AFTER TO-MORROW 

this golden age of which we are speaking will be 
tlie golden age of officials. In all our concerns it 
will be their beloved duty to meddle, with what tact, 
with what obliging words, analogy will aid us to 
imagine. It is likely these gentlemen will be pe- 
riodically elected; they will therefore have their 
turn of being underneath, which does not always 
sweeten men's conditions. The laws they will have 
to administer will be no clearer than those we know 
to-day, and the body which is to regulate their 
administration no wiser than the British Parlia- 
ment. So that upon all hands we may look for a 
form of servitude most galling to the blood — ser- 
vitude to many and changing masters — and for all 
the slights that accompany the rule of Jack in 
office. And if the Socialistic programme be carried 
out with the least fulness, we shall have lost a thing 
in most respects not much to be regretted, but, as 
a moderator of oppression, a thing nearly invalu- 
able — the newspaper. For the independent jour- 
nal is a creature of capital and competition; it 
stands and falls with millionaires and railway- 
bonds and all the abuses and glories of to-day ; and 
as soon as the State has fairly taken its bent to 
authority and philanthropy, and laid the least touch 
on private property, the days of the independent 
journal are numbered. State railways may be 
good things, and so may State bakeries ; but a State 
newspaper will never be a very trenchant critic of 
the State officials. 

But again, these officials would have no sinecure. 
Crime would perhaps be less, for some of the 



DAY AFTER TO-MORROW 309 

motives of crime we may suppose would pass away. 
But if Socialism were carried out with any fulness, 
there would be more contraventions. We see 
already new sins springing up like mustard — 
School Board sins, factory sins, Merchant Shipping 
Act sins — none of which I would be thought to 
except against in particular, but all of which, taken 
together, show us that Socialism can be a hard 
master even in the beginning. If it go on to such 
heights as we hear proposed and lauded, if it come 
actually to its ideal of the ant-heap, ruled with iron 
justice, the number of new contraventions will be 
out of all proportion multiplied. Take the case of 
work alone. Man is an idle animal. He is at least 
as intelligent as the ant ; but generations of advisers 
have in vain recommended him the ant's example. 
Of those who are found truly indefatigable in busi- 
ness, some are misers ; some are the practisers of 
delightful industries, like gardening; some are stu- 
dents, artists, inventors, or discoverers, men lured 
forward by successive hopes ; and the rest are those 
who live by games of skill or hazard — financiers, 
billiard-players, gamblers, and the like. But in 
unloved toils, even under the prick of necessity, no 
man is continually sedulous. Once eliminate the 
fear of starvation, once eliminate or bound the 
hope of riches, and we shall see plenty of skulking 
and malingering. Society will then be something 
not wholly unlike a cotton plantation in the old 
days; with cheerful, careless, demoralised slaves, 
with elected overseers, and, instead of the planter, 
a chaotic popular assembly. If the blood be pur- 



3IO DAY AFTER TO-MORROW 

poseful and the soil strong, such a plantation may 
succeed, and be, indeed, a busy ant-heap, with full 
granaries and long hours of leisure. But even then 
I think the whip will be in the overseer's hand, and 
not in vain. For, when it comes to be a question 
of each man doing his own share or the rest doing 
more, prettiness of sentiment will be forgotten. 
To dock the skulker's food is not enough ; many 
will rather eat haws and starve on petty pilferings 
than put their shoulder to the wheel for one hour 
daily. For such as these, then, the whip will be in 
the overseer's hand ; and his own sense of justice 
and the superintendence of a chaotic popular assem- 
bly will be the only checks on its employment. 
Now, you may be an industrious man and a good 
citizen, and yet not love, nor yet be loved by. Dr. 
Fell the inspector. It is admitted by private sol- 
diers that the disfavour of a sergeant is an evil 
not to be combated ; offend the sergeant, they say, 
and in a brief while you will either be disgraced or 
have deserted. And the sergeant can no longer 
appeal to the lash. But if these things go on, we 
shall see, or our sons shall see, what it is to have 
offended an inspector. 

This for the unfortunate. But with the fortu- 
nate also, even those whom the inspector loves, it 
may not be altogether well. It is concluded that in 
such a state of society, supposing it to be financially 
sound, the level of comfort will be high. It does 
not follow : there are strange depths of idleness in 
man, a too-easily-got sufficiency, as in the case of 
the sago-eaters, often quenching the desire for all 



DAY AFTER TO-MORROW 311 

besides ; and it is possible that the men of the rich- 
est ant-heaps may sink even into squalor. But sup- 
pose they do not ; suppose our tricksy instrument of 
human nature, when we play upon it this new tune, 
should respond kindly ; suppose no one to be 
damped and none exasperated by the new condi- 
tions, the whole enterprise to be financially sound 
— a vaulting supposition — and all the inhabitants 
to dwell together in a golden mean of comfort : we 
have yet to ask ourselves if this be what man desire, 
or if it be what man will even deign to accept for a 
continuance. It is certain that man loves to eat ; 
it is not certain that he loves that only or that best. 
He is supposed to love comfort ; it is not a love, at 
least, that he is faithful to. He is supposed to love 
happiness ; it is my contention that he rather loves 
excitement. Danger, enterprise, hope, the novel, 
the aleatory, are dearer to man than regular meals. 
He does not think so when he is hungry, but he 
thinks so again as soon as he is fed; and on the 
hypothesis of a successful ant-heap, he would never 
go hungry. It would be always after dinner in 
that society, as, in the land of the Lotus-eaters, it 
was always afternoon ; and food, which, when we 
have it not, seems all-important, drops in our es- 
teem, as soon as we have it, to a mere prerequisite 
of living. 

That for which man lives is not the same thing 
for all individuals nor in all ages ; yet it has a com- 
mon base ; what he seeks and what he must have 
is that which will seize and hold his attention. 
Regular meals and weather-proof lodgings will not 



312 DAY AFTER TO-MORROW 

do this long. Play in its wide sense, as the artificial 
induction of sensation, including all games and 
all arts, will, indeed, go far to keep him conscious 
of himself; but in the end he wearies for realities. 
Study or experiment, to some rare natures, is the 
unbroken pastime of a life. These are enviable 
natures ; people shut in the house by sickness often 
bitterly envy them ; but the commoner man cannot 
continue to exist upon such altitudes : his feet itch 
for physical adventure ; his blood boils for physical 
dangers, pleasures, and triumphs ; his fancy, the 
looker after new things, cannot continue to look for 
them in books and crucibles, but must seek them on 
the breathing stage of life. Pinches, buffets, the 
glow of hope, the shock of disappointment, furious 
contention with obstacles : these are the true elixir 
for all vital spirits, these are what they seek alike 
in their romantic enterprises and their unromantic 
dissipations. When they are taken in some pinch 
closer than the common, they cry, " Catch me here 
again ! " and sure enough you catch them there 
again — perhaps before the week is out. It is as 
old as Robinson Crusoe; as old as man. Our race 
has not been strained for all these ages through 
that sieve of dangers that we call Natural Selection, 
to sit down with patience in the tedium of safety ; 
the voices of its fathers call it forth. Already in 
our society as it exists, the bourgeois is too much 
cottoned about for any zest in living; he sits in 
his parlour out of reach of any danger, often out of 
reach of any vicissitudes but one of health ; and 
there he yawns. If the people in the next villa took 



DAY AFTER TO-MORROW 313 

pot-shots at him, he might be killed indeed, but so 
long as he escaped he would find his blood oxy- 
genated and his views of the world brighter. If 
Mr. Mallock, on his way to the publishers, should 
have his skirts pinned to the wall by a javelin, it 
would not occur to him — at least for several hours 

— to ask if life were worth living; and if such peril 
were a daily matter, he would ask it nevermore; 
he would have other things to think about, he 
would be living indeed — not lying in a box with 
cotton, safe, but immeasurably dull. The aleatory, 
whether it touch life, or fortune, or renown — 
whether we explore Africa or only toss for half- 
pence — that is what I conceive men to love best, 
and that is what we are seeking to exclude from 
men's existences. Of all forms of the aleatory, that 
which most commonly attends our working-men — 
the danger of misery from want of work — is the 
least inspiriting : it does not whip the blood, it does 
not evoke the glory of contest; it is tragic, but it 
is passive ; and yet, in so far as it is aleatory, and 
a peril sensibly touching them, it does truly season 
the men's lives. Of those who fail, I do not speak 

— despair should be sacred ; but to those who even 
modestly succeed, the changes of their life bring 
interest : a job found, a shilling saved, a dainty 
earned, all these are wells of pleasure springing 
afresh for the successful poor ; and it is not from 
these but from the villa-dweller that we hear com- 
plaints of the unworthiness of life. Much, then, as 
the average of the proletariat would gain in this 
new state of life, they would also lose a certain 



314 DAY AFTER TO-MORROW 

something, which would not be missed in the begin- 
ning, but would be missed progressively, and pro- 
gressively lamented. Soon there would be a look- 
ing back : there would be tales of the old world 
humming in young men's ears, tales of the tramp 
and the pedlar, and the hopeful emigrant. And 
in the stall-fed life of the successful ant-heap — 
with its regular meals, regular duties, regular 
pleasures, an even course of life, and fear excluded 
— the vicissitudes, delights, and havens of to-day 
will seem of epic breadth. This may seem a shal- 
low observation ; but the springs by which men are 
moved lie much on the surface. Bread, I believe, 
has always been considered first, but the circus 
comes close upon its heels. Bread we suppose to 
be given amply; the cry for circuses will be the 
louder, and if the life of our descendants be such 
as we have conceived, there are two beloved pleas- 
ures on which they will be likely to fall back : the 
pleasures of intrigue and of sedition. 

In all this I have supposed the ant-heap to be 
financially sound. I am no economist, only a 
writer of fiction ; but even as such, I know one 
thing that bears on the economic question — I 
know the imperfection of man's faculty for business. 
The Anarchists, who count some rugged elements 
of common-sense among what seem to me their 
tragic errors, have said upon this matter all that I 
could wish to say. and condemned beforehand great 
economical polities. So far it is obvious that they 
are right ; they may be right also in predicting a 
period of communal independence, and they may 



DAY AFTER TO-MORROW 315 

even be right in thinking that desirable. But the 
rise of communes is none the less the end of eco- 
nomic equality, just when we were told it was begin- 
ning. Communes will not be all equal in extent, 
nor in quality of soil, nor in growth of population ; 
nor will the surplus produce of all be equally 
marketable. It will be the old story of competing 
interests, only with a new unit; and, as it appears 
to me, a new, inevitable danger. For the merchant 
and the manufacturer, in this new world, will be a 
sovereign commune ; it is a sovereign power that 
will see its crops undersold, and its manufactures 
worsted in the market. And all the more dan- 
gerous that the sovereign power should be small. 
Great powers are slow to stir; national affronts, 
even with the aid of newspapers, filter slowly into 
popular consciousness ; national losses are so un- 
equally shared that one part of the population will 
be counting its gains while another sits by a cold 
hearth. But in the sovereign commune all will be 
centralised and sensitive. When jealousy springs 
up, when (let us say) the commune of Poole has 
overreached the commune of Dorchester, irritation 
will run like quicksilver throughout the body politic ; 
each man in Dorchester will have to suffer directly 
in his diet and his dress ; even the secretary, who 
drafts the official correspondence, will sit down to 
his task embittered, as a man who has dined ill and 
may expect to dine worse ; and thus a business differ- 
ence between communes will take on much the same 
colour as a dispute between diggers in the lawless 
West, and will lead as directly to the arbitrament of 



3i6 DAY AFTER TO-MORROW 

blows. So that the estabhshment of the communal 
system will not only reintroduce all the injustices 
and heartburnings of economic inequality, but 
will, in all human likelihood, inaugurate a world 
of hedgerow warfare. Dorchester will march on 
Poole, Sherborne on Dorchester, Wimborne on 
both ; the waggons will be fired on as they follow 
the highway, the trains wrecked on the lines, the 
ploughman will go armed into the field of tillage; 
and if we have not a return of ballad literature, 
the local press at least will celebrate in a high vein 
the victory of Cerne Abbas or the reverse of Toller 
Porcorum. At least this will not be dull ; when I 
was younger, I could have welcomed such a world 
with relief; but it is the New-Old with a ven- 
geance, and irresistibly suggests the growth of mili- 
tary powers and the foundation of new empires. 



V 

BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLU- 
ENCED ME 

THE Editor ^ has somewhat insidiously laid 
a trap for his correspondents, the ques- 
tion put appearing at first so innocent, 
truly cutting so deep. It is not, indeed, until after 
some reconnaissance and review that the writer 
awakes to find himself engaged upon something in 
the nature of autobiography, or, perhaps worse, 
upon a chapter in the life of that little, beautiful 
brother whom we once all had, and whom we have 
all lost and mourned, the man we ought to have 
been, the man we hoped to be. But when word has 
been passed (even to an editor), it should, if pos- 
sible, be kept ; and if sometimes I am wise and say 
too little, and sometimes weak and say too much, 
the blame must lie at the door of the person who 
entrapped me. 

The most influential books, and the truest in 
their influence, are works of fiction. They do not 
pin the reader to a dogma, which he must after- 
wards discover to be inexact ; they do not teach 
him a lesson, which he must afterwards unlearn. 

1 Of the British Weekly. 



3i8 BOOKS WHICH HAVE 

They repeat, .they rearrange, they clarify the les- 
sons of life ; they disengage us from ourselves, 
they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; 
and they show us the web of experience, not as we 
can see it for ourselves, but with a singular change 
— that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, 
for the nonce, struck out. ^ To be so, they must be 
reasonably true to the human comedy ; and any 
work that is so serves the turn of instruction. But 
the course of our education is answered best by 
those poems and romances where we breathe a 
magnanimous atmosphere of thought and meet 
generous and pious characters. Shakespeare has 
served me best. Few living friends have had upon 
me an influence so strong for good as Hamlet or 
Rosalind. The last character, already well beloved 
in the reading, I had the good fortune to see, I 
must think, in an impressionable hour, played by 
Mrs. Scott Siddons. Nothing has ever more 
moved, more delighted, more refreshed me ; nor 
has the influence quite passed away. Kent's brief 
speech over the dying Lear had a great effect upon 
my mind, and was the burthen of my reflections 
for long, so profoundly, so touchingly generous 
did it appear in sense, so overpowering in expres- 
sion. Perhaps my dearest and best friend outside 
of Shakespeare is D'Artagnan — the elderly DAr- 
tagnan of the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I know 
not a more human soul, nor, in his way, a finer; 
I shall be very sorry for the man who is so much 
of a pedant in morals that he cannot learn from 
the Captain of Musketeers. Lastly, I must name 



INFLUENCED ME 319 

the Pilgrim's Progress, a book that breathes of 
every, beautiful and vakiable emotion. 

But of works of art httle can be said ; their in- 
fluence is profound and silent, like the influence of 
nature ; they mould by contact ; we drink them 
up like water, and are bettered, yet know not how. 
It is in books more specifically didactic that we can 
follow out the effect, and distinguish and weigh 
and compare. A book which has been very influ- 
ential upon me fell early into my hands, and so 
may stand first, though I think its influence was 
only sensible later on, and perhaps still keeps grow- 
ing, for it is a book not easily outlived : the Essais 
of Montaigne. That temperate and genial picture 
of life is a great gift to place in the hands of per- 
sons of to-day ; they will find in these smiling pages 
a magazine of heroism and wisdom, all of an an- 
tique strain ; they will have their " linen decencies " 
and excited orthodoxies fluttered, and will (if they 
have any gift of reading) perceive that these have 
not been fluttered without some excuse and ground 
of reason ; and (again if they have any gift of read- 
ing) they will end by seeing that this old gentleman 
was in a dozen ways a finer fellow, and held in a 
dozen ways a nobler view of life, than they or their 
contemporaries. 

The next book, in order of time, to influence me, 
was the New Testament, and in particular the Gos- 
pel according to St. Matthew. I believe it would 
startle and move any one if they could make a cer- 
tain effort of imagination and read it freshly like 
a book, not droningly and dully like a portion of the 



320 BOOKS WHICH HAVE 

Bible. Any one would then be able to see in it those 
truths which we are all courteously supposed to 
know and all modestly refrain from applying. But 
upon this subject it is perhaps better to be silent. 

I come next to Whitman's Leaves of Grass, a 
book of singular service, a book which tumbled 
the world upside down for me, blew into space a 
thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, 
and, having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set 
me back again upon a strong foundation of all the 
original and manly virtues. But it is, once more, 
only a book for those who have the gift of reading. 
I will be very frank — I believe it is so with all 
good books except, perhaps, fiction. The average 
man lives, and must live, so wholly in convention, 
that gunpowder charges of the truth are more apt 
to discompose than to invigorate his creed. Either 
he cries out upon blasphemy and indecency, and 
crouches the closer round that little idol of part- 
truths and part-conveniences which is the contem- 
porary deity, or he is convinced by what is new, 
forgets what is old, and becomes truly blasphemous 
and indecent himself. New truth is only useful to 
supplement the old ; rough truth is only wanted to 
expand, not to destroy, our civil and often elegant 
conventions. He who. cannot judge had better 
stick to fiction and the daily papers. There he will 
get little harm, and, in the first at least, some good. 

Close upon the back of my discovery of Whit- 
man, I came under the influence of Herbert 
Spencer. No more persuasive rabbi exists, and 
few better. How mucli of his vast structure will 



INFLUENCED ME 321 

bear the touch of time, how much is clay and how 
much brass, it were too curious to inquire. But 
his words, if dry, are always manly and honest; 
there dwells in his pages a spirit of highly abstract 
joy, plucked naked like an algebraic symbol but 
still joyful ; and the reader will find there a caput 
mortuum of piety, with little indeed of its loveli- 
ness, but with most of its essentials ; and these two 
qualities make him a wholesome, as his intellectual 
vigour makes him a bracing, writer. I should be 
much of a hound if I lost my gratitude to Herbert 
Spencer. 

Goethe's Life, by Lewes, had a great impor- 
tance for me when it first fell into my hands — a 
strange instance of the partiality of man's good and 
man's evil. I know no one whom I less admire 
than Goethe ; he seems a very epitome of the sins 
of genius, breaking open the doors of private life, 
and wantonly wounding friends, in that crowning 
offence of Wcrthcr, and in his own character a 
mere pen-and-ink Napoleon, conscious of the rights 
and duties of superior talents as a Spanish in- 
quisitor was conscious of the rights and duties of 
his office. And yet in his fine devotion to his art, 
in his honest and serviceable friendship for Schiller, 
what lessons are contained ! Biography, usually 
so false to its office, does here for once perform for 
us some of the work of fiction, reminding us, that is, 
of the truly mingled tissue of man's nature, and 
how huge faults and shining virtues cohabit and 
persevere in the same character. History serves 
us well to this effect, but in the originals,, not in 



322 BOOKS WHICH HAVE 

the pages, of the popular epitomiser, who is bound, 
by the very nature of his task, to make us feel the 
difference of epochs instead of the essential iden- 
tity of man, and even in the originals only to those 
who can recognise their own human virtues and 
defects in strange forms, often inverted and under 
strange names, often interchanged. Martial is a 
poet of no good repute, and it gives a man new 
thoughts to read his works dispassionately, and 
find in this unseemly jester's serious passages 
the image of a kind, wise, and self-respecting 
gentleman. It is customary, I suppose, in reading 
Martial, to leave out these pleasant verses ; I never 
heard of them, at least, until I found them for my- 
self ; and this partiality is one among a thousand 
things that help to build up our distorted and hys- 
terical conception of the great Roman Empire. 

This brings us by a natural transition to a very 
noble book — the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. 
The dispassionate gravity, the noble forgetfulness 
of self, the tenderness of others, that are there ex- 
pressed and were practised on so great a scale in 
the life of its writer, make this book a book quite 
by itself. No one can read it and not be moved. 
Yet it scarcely or rarely appeals to the feelings — 
those very mobile, those not very trusty parts of 
man. Its address lies further back: its lesson 
comes more deeply home; when you have read, 
you carry away with you a memory of the man 
himself; it is as though you had touched a loyal 
hand, looked into brave eyes, and made a noble 
friend; there is another bond on you thencefor- 



INFLUENCED ME 323 

ward, binding you to life and to the love of 
virtue. 

Wordsworth should perhaps come next. Every- 
one has been influenced by Wordsworth, and it is 
hard to tell precisely how. A certain innocence, a 
rugged austerity of joy^^a sight of the stars, " the 
silence that is in the lonely hills," something of the 
cold thrill of dawn, cling to his work and give it 
a particular address to what is best in us. I do not 
know that you learn a lesson ; you need not — Mill 
did not — agree with any one of his beliefs ; and 
yet the spell is cast. Such are the best teachers : a 
dogma learned is only a new error — the old one 
was perhaps as good ; but a spirit communicated is 
a perpetual possession. These best teachers climb 
beyond teaching to the plane of art ; it is them- 
selves, and what is best in themselves, that they 
communicate. 

I should never forgive myself if I forgot The 
Egoist. It is art, if you like, but it belongs purely 
to didactic art, and from all the novels I have read 
(and I have read thousands) stands in a place by 
itself. Here is a Nathan for the modern David; 
here is a book to send the blood into men's faces. 
Satire, the angry picture of human faults, is not 
great art ; we can all be angry with our neigh- 
bour ; what we want is to be shown, not his defects, 
of which we are too conscious, but his merits, to 
which we are too blind. And The Egoist is a 
satire ; so much must be allowed ; but it is a satire 
of a singular quality, which tells you nothing of 
that obvious mote, which is engaged from first to 



324 BOOKS WHICH HAVE 

last with that invisible beam. It is yourself that is 
hunted down; these are your own faults that are 
dragged into the day and numbered, with lingering 
relish, with cruel cunning and precision. A young 
friend of Mr. Meredith's (as I have the story) 
came to him in an agony. " This is too bad of 
you," he cried. " Willoughby is me! " " No, my 
dear fellow," said the author; " he is all of us." I 
have read The Egoist five or six times myself, and 
I mean to read it again; for I am like the young 
friend of the anecdote — I think Willoughby an un- 
manly but a very serviceable exposure of myself. 

I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that I 
have forgotten much that was most influential, as I 
see already I have forgotten Thoreau, and Hazlitt, 
whose paper " On the Spirit of Obligations " was 
a turning-point in my life, and Penn, whose little 
book of aphorisms had a brief but strong effect on 
me, and Mitford's Talcs of Old Japan, wherein I 
learned for the first time the proper attitude of any 
rational man to his country's laws — a secret found, 
and kept, in the Asiatic islands. That I should 
commemorate all is more than I can hope or the 
Editor could ask. It will be more to the point, after 
having said so much upon improving books, to say 
a word or two about the improvable reader. The 
gift of reading, as I have called it, is not very com- 
mon, nor very generally understood. It consists, 
first of all, in a vast intellectual endowment — a 
free grace, I find I must call it — by which a man 
rises to understand that he is not punctually right, 
nor those from whom he differs absolutely wrong. 



INFLUENCED ME 325 

He may hold dogmas ; he may hold them passion- 
ately ; and he may know that others hold them but 
coldly, or hold them differently, or hold them not 
at all. Well, if he has the gift of reading, these 
others will be full of meat for him. They will see 
the other side of propositions and the other side of 
virtues. He need not change his dogma for that, 
but he may change his reading" of that dogma, and 
he must supplement and correct his deductions 
from it. A human truth, which is always very 
much a lie, hides as much of life as it displays. It 
is men who hold another truth, or, as it seems to 
us, perhaps, a dangerous lie, who can extend our 
restricted field of knowledge, and rouse our drowsy 
consciences. Something that seems quite new, or 
that seems insolently false or very dangerous, is the 
test of a reader. If he tries to see what it means, 
what truth excuses it, he has the gift, and let him 
read. If he is merely hurt, or offended, or exclaims 
upon his author's folly, he had better take to the 
daily papers ; he will never be a reader. 

And here, with the aptest illustrative force, after 
I have laid down my part-truth, I must step in w^ith 
its opposite. For, after all, we are vessels of a very 
limited content. Not all men can read all books ; 
it is only in a chosen few that any man will find his 
appointed food ; and the fittest lessons are the most 
palatable, and make themselves welcome to the 
mind. A writer learns this early, and it is his chief 
support ; he goes on unafraid, laying down the 
law ; and he is sure at heart that most of what he 
says is demonstrably false, and much of a mingled 



326 BOOKS 

strain, and some hurtful, and very little good for 
service ; but he is sure besides that when his words 
fall into the hands of any genuine reader, they will 
be weighed and winnowed, and only that which 
suits will be assimilated; and when they fall into 
the hands of one who cannot intelligently read, they 
come there quite silent and inarticulate, falling 
upon deaf ears, and his secret is kept as if he had 
not written. 



VI 

THE GENESIS OF "THE MASTER 
OF BALLANTRAE" 

I WAS walking one night in the veranda of a 
small house in which I lived, outside the ham- 
let of Saranac. It was winter ; the night was 
very dark; the air extraordinary clear and cold, 
and sweet with the purity of forests. From a good 
way below, the river was to be heard contending 
with ice and boulders : a few lights appeared, scat- 
tered unevenly among the darkness, but so far 
away as not to lessen the sense of isolation. For 
the making of a story here were fine conditions. I 
was besides moved with the spirit of emulation, for 
I had just finished my third or fourth perusal of 
The Phtmtoni Ship. " Come," said I to my engine, 
" let us make a tale, a story of many years and 
countries, of the sea and the land, savagery and 
civilisation ; a story that shall have the same large 
features and may be treated in the same summary 
elliptic method as the book you have been reading 
and admiring." I was here brought up with a 
reflection exceedingly just in itself, but which, as 
the sequel shows, I failed to profit by. I saw that 
Marryat, not less than Homer, Milton, and Virgil, 



328 GENESIS OF THE 

profited by the choice of a famiHar and legendary 
subject; so that he prepared his readers on the 
very title-page; and this set me cudgelling my 
brains, if by any chance I could hit upon some 
similar belief to be the centrepiece of my own 
meditated fiction. In the course of this vain 
search there cropped up in my memory a singu- 
lar case of a buried and resuscitated fakir, which 
I had been often told by an uncle of mine, then 
lately dead, Inspector-General John Balfour. 

On such a fine frosty night, with no wind and the 
thermometer below zero, the brain works with 
much vivacity ; and the next moment I had seen 
the circumstance transplanted from India and the 
tropics to the Adirondack wilderness and the strin- 
gent cold of the Canadian border. Here then, 
almost before I had begun my story, I had two 
countries, two of the ends of the earth involved : 
and thus though the notion of the resuscitated man 
failed entirely on the score of general acceptation, 
or even (as I have since found) acceptability, it 
fitted at once with my design of a tale of many 
lands; and this decided me to consider further of 
its possibilities. The man who should thus be buried 
was the first question: a good man, whose return 
to life would be hailed by the reader and the other 
characters with gladness? This trenched upon the 
Christian picture and was dismissed. If the idea, 
then, was to be of any use at all for me, I had to 
create a kind of evil genius to his friends and 
family, take him through many disappearances, and 
malce this final restoration from the pit of death, in 



MASTER OF BALLANTRAE 329 

the icy American wilderness, the last and grimmest 
of the series. I need not tell my brothers of the 
craft that I was now in the most interesting moment 
of an author's life; the hours that followed that 
night upon the balcony, and the following nights 
and days, whether walking abroad or lying wakeful 
in my bed, were hours of unadulterated joy. My 
mother, who was then living with me alone, per- 
haps had less enjoyment; for, in the absence of 
my wife, who is my usual helper in these times of 
parturition, I must spur her up at all seasons to 
hear me relate and try to clarify my unformed 
fancies. 

And while I was groping for the fable and the 
characters required, behold, I found them lying 
ready and nine years old in my memory. Pease 
porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge 
in the pot. nine years old. Was there ever a more 
complete justification of the rule of Horace? Here, 
thinking of quite other things, I had stumbled on 
the solution, or perhaps I should rather say (in 
stagevk'right phrase) the Curtain or final Tableau of 
a story conceived long before on the moors between 
Pitlochry and Strathardle, conceived in the High- 
land rain, in the blend of the smell of heather and 
bog-plants, and with a mind full of the Athole cor- 
respondence and the memories of the dumlicide 
Justice. So long ago, so far away it was, that I 
had first evoked the faces and the mutual tragic 
situation of the men of Durisdeer. 

My story was now world-wide enough : Scot- 
land, India, and America being all obligatory 



330 GENESIS OF THE 

scenes. But of these India was strange to me ex- 
cept in books ; I had never known any living Indian 
save a Parsee, a member of my cUib in London, 
equally civilised and (to all seeing) equally occi- 
dental with myself. It was plain, thus far, that I 
should have to get into India and out of it again 
upon a foot of fairy lightness ; and I believe this 
first suggested to me the idea of the Chevalier 
Burke for a narrator. It was at first intended that 
he should be Scottish, and I was then filled with 
fears that he might prove only the degraded 
shadow of my own Alan Breck. Presently, how- 
ever, it began to occur to me it would be like my 
Master to curry favour with the Prince's Irishmen ; 
and that an Irish refugee would have a particular 
reason to find himself in India with his countryman, 
the unfortunate Lally. Irish, therefore, I decided 
he should be, and then, all of a sudden, I was 
aware of a tall shadow across my path, the shadow 
of Barry Lyndon. No man (in Lord Foppington's 
phrase) of a nice morality could go very deep with 
my Master : in the original idea of this story con- 
ceived in Scotland, this companion had been besides 
intended to be worse than the bad elder son with 
whom (as it was then meant) he was to visit 
Scotland; if I took an Irishman, and a very bad 
Irishman, in the midst of the eighteenth century, 
how was I to evade Barry Lyndon ? The wretch 
besieged me, offering his services ; he gave me ex- 
cellent references; he proved that he was highly 
fitted for the work I had to do; he, or my own 
evil heart, suggested it was easy to disguise his 



MASTER OF BALLANTRAE 331 

ancient livery with a little lace and a few frogs 
and buttons, so that Thackeray himself should 
hardly recognise him. And then of a sudden 
there came to me memories of a young Irishman, 
with whom I was once intimate, and had spent 
long nights walking and talking" with, upon a 
very desolate coast in a bleak autumn : I recalled 
him as a youth of an extraordinary moral sim- 
plicity — almost vacancy ; plastic to any influence, 
the creature of his admirations : and putting such 
a youth in fancy into the career of a soldier of for- 
tune, it occurred to me that he would serve my turn 
as well as Mr. Lyndon, and in place of entering into 
competition with the Master, would afford a slight 
though a distinct relief. I know not if I have done 
him well, though his moral dissertations always 
highly entertained me : but I own I have been sur- 
prised to find that he reminded some critics of 
Barry Lyndon after all. . . . 






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